Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (6 page)

“It’s eating,” Marzi said. “So it’s
growing
. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“Yeah. And I think it’s still in town. I follow... I don’t know... intuitions. Vibrations. The advice of creatures wiser than myself, sometimes, though they haven’t been a lot of help when it comes to finding this thing. I went to a beach outside of town this morning and found what I’m pretty sure was a pacemaker lying in the sand near the water. The thing was dry, so it hadn’t been there long – the tide was out – which means the Outsider took a victim earlier
today
. You saw the shadow days ago, too, and that’s different. The Outsider has never stayed in one place for so long. That worries me. I thought it was just wandering aimlessly... but maybe it had a destination. If it’s lingering here, maybe there’s something it wants.”

“You say it’s from... another universe?”

“It’s complicated, but that’s about right, yeah.”

Marzi had some experience with things that came from other worlds. She chose her words carefully. “In your experience, are there places where reality is... a little squishy?”

He raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that was somehow familiar – maybe she’d seen him do it in one of his movies. “There are. I take some professional interest in places like that.”

“I told you about the Outlaw – the god of earthquakes. He came to Santa Cruz through a door. A door that shouldn’t have existed, a door that
didn’t
exist, at least not before something wanted to walk through it. The room where that door opened, I think it’s over one of those squishy places. Reality melts and runs and re-forms in there. It seems to me, if this shadow is a creature from
outside
, it might be interested in places like that.” She rose. “Do you want to see it? The room where the door used to be?”

“Not especially.” He grimaced. “But I think I probably
should
.”

Bradley in the Wilderness

Bradley followed Marzi – and her name was so close to Marla’s; was that just coincidence, or something else? She led him out of the Teatime Room and around the café’s front counter, on through the little kitchen, where the walls were decorated with mutant sunflowers, their stems segmented like the tails of scorpions. She paused in front of a wooden door, put her hand on the knob, and then stood there, head lowered, as if preparing herself for an ordeal. What was waiting behind that door? What would this “squishy” place look like?

Bradley thought he was doing a good job of not letting his panic and bewilderment show. He’d come in here to get a drink and think, and hadn’t expected to stumble into another psychic. Marzi didn’t have the raw power he did, but she’d apparently stumbled into some heavy shit a few years back and come through intact, which made her just as battle-hardened as Bradley himself, and a whole lot luckier.

“The last time I went in here,” Marzi said, head still bowed, “it was just a storage room, with a mural of a desert on the walls, all sand dunes and a big yellow sun and cartoony cactuses.”

“Okay,” Bradley said. “Doesn’t sound too terrifying.”

She lifted her head. “Once upon a time, there used to be a door in the far wall. A door with a brass knob. That door should have just opened to nowhere, to the inside of a wall or the alley out back, at best, but instead it opened to... somewhere else. Something terrible came through that door. After I killed it, the door disappeared.”

“Ah. And now you’re wondering, what if the door came back?”

“You’re the one who saw visions of doors, dude.” She sighed. “Might as well find out, huh?” She pulled open the door and stepped inside, and after a moment, Bradley followed.

The room filled with blinding yellow light, followed by a black interval that obliterated Bradley’s senses. In the darkness, light bloomed: a cartoon-yellow sun rising over a desert that combined the endless rolling dunes of the Sahara with towering saguaro cactuses from the Southwest. Rough stone towers like the spires in Arizona loomed in the distance, and were those pyramids? The ground shimmered and became flat, faintly glittering sand, scattered with scrub brush; then shifted again to dirty white salt flats; then again to a valley, lined with cliffs. As if all the deserts of the world had been jumbled together. As if somehow, in this place, all deserts were the same desert.

Bradley pushed himself upright, the ground gritty beneath his palms. The heat of the sun was implacable, though it still looked unreal, canary-yellow, and he could gaze at it directly without his vision blurring or burning. The landscape continued to shift, and at first, all the variations seemed equally lifeless, but then flashes of movement caught his eye: a snake sidewinding away, something small and furry scuttling under a rock, a scorpion moving in a stately march, pincers raised almost daintily. There was life here: quick, stealthy, possibly toxic, but alive. He turned in a slow circle, and directly behind him, found a door: painted a faded yellow, with a brass knob mottled with age. He put his hand on the doorknob –

And blinked up at Marzi, who had his head in her lap, and looked down at him with something between annoyance and concern. “Ugh.” He sat up and got his bearings. They were in the little kitchen, the door to the storage room closed again. “That was... wow. That desert. Have you been to that desert?”

“Once or twice.” Her voice was as dry as the place he’d just left. “You know, the first time I went into that room and got a glimpse of that desert, I repressed the memory and basically had a nervous breakdown. You just go ‘Ugh.’ Are you that much more badass than I am?”

Bradley got to his feet, swaying unsteadily. “I doubt it. Maybe slightly more experienced at having the supernatural dropped on my head. The first time
I
encountered some impossible shit I ran right out and started doing drugs and didn’t really stop for a few years. You just had a nervous breakdown? You’re made of tougher stuff than me. So, uh... what was I looking at in there?”

She shrugged. “This guy I knew called it the Medicine Lands, but who knows? It’s a place where gods, or things that we might as well call gods, live. There was one little god, a spirit of wildfire and earthquake and mudslide, that came stomping out and caused trouble until my friends and I killed it, or at least made it go away for a while. There’s another thing living in there, too, a thing I’ve only seen in dreams, where it appears like an immense scorpion. I think it’s the god of... I don’t know. Spiders, snakes, things that can survive in the desert, but maybe it’s not as literal as that. More like a spirit of survival despite horrible adversity, a god of life in the face of terrible odds.”

Bradley grunted. “Sounds like I’ve got a new patron saint. While we were in there, did you happen to notice – was the impossible door back?”

“Oh, yeah. Same old wood, same brass knob. I didn’t try to open it, though. It blasted you pretty good right through the closed door.”

“You, uh, might want to throw a padlock on that thing.”

“You think?” Her amusement was palpable.

“Every once in a while I do. So this thing I’m chasing, this Outsider, do you think it might be drawn to that room – or to the place that’s accessible
through
that room, through that new door of yours?”

“It’s not my door. I don’t know, man. You have a better handle on this stuff than I do. But if that shadow monster is hanging around here, I doubt it’s because of how much it loves my lattes. And that door being back... it means
something
. So what do we do?”

“I’m going to make some calls,” Bradley said. “Consult some experts. Can I get your number? I’ll be in touch.”

•

Bradley sat on a bench in a little park overlooking the trickle of the San Lorenzo River and burned through the afternoon making phone calls. He had to go through a lot of underlings before he reached Sanford Cole, and it took some convincing to make Cole believe his identity – Bradley had to submit to a lot of personal questions, but fortunately, his home reality had been identical to this one until after he left Cole’s service, so all the answers lined up.

Cole was the rather reluctant ruler of San Francisco, a wizard from the Victorian era who’d been awakened from magical sleep a while back when his beloved home city was under threat. Bradley had served as his apprentice for a while before taking up with Marla Mason – which, of course, had led to his death in this branch of the multiverse.

“Bradley! What brings you to our humble plane of existence?” His voice was cheerful and bright, which was a relief. Cole’s long sleep had left him with a case of magical narcolepsy, and Bradley had been half afraid the old wizard would be in hibernation.

“Would you believe I’m a tourist?”

“Not for a moment. The overseer of the multiverse doesn’t send a fragment of his attention to one lonesome branch of his domain for rest and recreation – at least, the bits of him
I
had a hand in teaching wouldn’t. I assume this is something important? No, I’m dissembling – I assume it’s something
disastrous
.”

“Well... it’s something potentially disastrous, let’s say. An incursion from another universe. It’s just a nuisance right now.” Gods. The thing had killed between thirty and fifty people, as far as Bradley could tell, and he called it a nuisance. But when the potential death toll included every living thing in this reality, fifty dead was.... It was all a matter of perspective. “I’m down in Santa Cruz trying to get a handle on the situation.”

“Do you need help? I can have specialists in various disciplines there in an hour and a half – and that’s if they don’t hurry.”

“It might come to that,” Bradley said. “Though at this point, I wouldn’t know what kind of help to ask for. I hope I’m here early enough to stop this incursion without too much difficulty. I mostly need information – I don’t want to step on any magical toes here, or have someone jump on me with both feet if I start doing big magic in town. Normally I’d pay my respects to the local bosses and let them know about the monster hunting within their borders, try to coordinate with the local talent, but does Santa Cruz even
have
a chief sorcerer, or a council, or a protector, or anything? Because they seem to leave jobs like fighting earthquake gods to twenty-something baristas around here.”

“Mmm, I seem to recall hearing something...” The sound of flipping pages crackled through the phone. Cole was not a technology kind of guy. He was probably talking on an antique candlestick phone magically hooked into the cellular grid. “Ah. Yes. There is a chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz and surrounding areas, though he’s never attended any of the statewide councils, as far as I can determine. He keeps to himself. I’ll give you his contact information, if you’d like.”

“Sure, I’ll take phone, email, whatever.”

Cole cleared his throat. “Ah. No. I mean, I can tell you where you might find him squatting at this time of year.”

•

The occult ruler of Santa Cruz looked like an aging hippie, and when he grinned, he showed off brown gapped teeth. Bradley felt a moment’s doubt –
this
guy? Why would any halfway decent sorcerer let his teeth go rotten? Then again, there were sorcerers who embraced madness, or cut their own limbs off, or their own tongues out; one of Marla Mason’s teachers had ritually castrated himself for magical purposes, so maybe there was some benefit in having a mouth full of fuzzy tombstones. The man gestured to a stained Mexican blanket spread out beside him on the beach, displaying a hodgepodge of wares: old engine parts, loose tarot cards, mason jars full of seashells and marbles, a leather rose, a toy switchblade, and a lone plastic scorpion, unevenly painted red.

The scorpion, the switchblade, and some of the engine parts sparkled in Bradley’s peripheral vision if he didn’t look at them directly: there was something magical about them, some quality inherent or imbued that tickled his psychic senses.

“Is your name, uh, ‘The Bammer’?” Bradley asked.

The old man squinted at him for a moment, then threw his head back and laughed a laugh with a lot of wheeze in it. When his hilarity had subsided, he leveled his gaze at Bradley, and his eyes were as dark and watchful as a falcon’s. “Is that
anybody
’s name? But it’s one of the names I give, sure, and if
that’s
the name you heard, you’re hooked into that whole wizardly bureaucracy business.” He shook his head, as if in patient bafflement at the folly of humankind. “What are you doing here? Is there some kind of big conclave you want to invite me to? Because if it’s not held on this beach, or downtown, or on the boardwalk, or up in a redwood cathedral, you can count the Bammer out.”

“No, I’m not here on any kind of official business.” Bradley sat down cross-legged on the sand. “But I hear you’re the guy who runs this town.”

“Chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz.” He nodded, then took a glass pipe from his satchel and began to pack it with weed. Bradley, being in recovery – he wasn’t an addict in
every
universe, just the ones where he’d ever tried any drugs at all – watched him with a mixture of fascination and dread. The Bammer lit the pipe took a deep hit, started to pass the pipe to Bradley, then gave a sad smile and put it down in the sand, on the side farthest from Bradley. He exhaled. “Also chief sorcerer of Soquel and Capitola-by-the-Sea, by the way. Not Ben Lomond, though. There’s a woman up there, lives in a redwood tree, she’s got that covered.”

“Uh huh. So maybe you didn’t notice, but you’ve got a pretty major extra-dimensional incursion here.”

The Bammer nodded. “Not so major yet. It doesn’t even have enough meat on its bones to pass for human in a dark alley. Give it time, though.” He clucked his tongue. “Nasty business.”

“Okay, so... chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz... what are you going to
do
about it?”

The Bammer gazed out at the bay for a long while, toward the bobbing boats and the surfers and the distant curves of land on either side. “Murderville USA,” he said. “Murder Capital of the World. That’s what they called my city back in the ‘70s. October 1970 to April 1973, there were three active serial killers who hunted around here. Twenty-six dead.”