Free The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl by Tim Pratt Page A

hold court, tell stories, get in fistfights. He specialized in these sort of mock-cutesy images with a sinister overlay—sort of Norman Rockwell viewed through a mescaline trip, nightmarish Currier and Ives. Then Ray moved to California, doing more underground illustration, murals here and there. Genius Loci used to be a shared-house artists’ collective; lots of people moved in and out, but Ray lived there for years—he was the linchpin. In 1989, he disappeared. The murals in Genius Loci are his last works, as far as anyone knows.”
    Marzi hadn’t known that, about the café’s history. “Ray disappeared after the earthquake, right?”
    Jonathan shook his head. “
During
the earthquake. He was seen that morning, but once the quake hit, that was it. No more Garamond Ray. He’s not officially listed as one of the fatalities, because his body was never found. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him. He was a real hog for publicity and attention, though, and most people think that his being silent for so long means he’s definitely dead.”
    “And now you’re studying him.”
    Jonathan spread his hands. “I want to be the leading expert on the life and works of Garamond Ray. Beats ditchdigging. I had a little extra money, so I thought I’d come to Santa Cruz, live where Ray lived, surround myself with his work, and finish the writing here. The photos I’ve seen don’t do the murals justice. That one, of the street café, with the gods—”
    “The Teatime Room,” Marzi said, nodding. The mural in the Teatime Room featured a host of Egyptian gods seated at a Parisian-style sidewalk café. Thoth dipped his beak into a fluted glass, Anubis sipped from a porcelain cup brimming with blood, and Sekhmet held a tea-press that contained a human heart. “I love that painting. It should be creepy, but it’s somehow just . . .
peaceful
.”
    He looked interested again, and Marzi wondered if art was the only thing that cracked his cool. “All the rooms have names?” he asked.
    “Unofficial ones, sure. As far as I know, Ray never titled them.”
    “Still, it’s a useful shorthand I can use in my paper. What are the names?”
    Marzi counted on her fingers. “The Circus Room, the Ocean Room, the Teatime Room, and the Cloud Room. Then there’s the main room—if we called it anything, we’d call it the Space Room. And there are some mutant-looking sunflowers painted in the kitchen—they have stems segmented like crab legs—but we don’t have a special name for the kitchen.”
    “So that’s six rooms, counting the kitchen. But aren’t there supposed to be seven rooms? That’s what I always heard. There’s supposed to be another—”
    Just then Lindsay came over, holding a drink in one hand and leading a boy with the other. Marzi felt strangely relieved by the interruption. She didn’t want to talk about the seventh room, the closed-up storage room behind the kitchen. She wasn’t sure
why
she wanted to avoid the subject—there was no big mystery, it wasn’t like Bluebeard’s guestroom or anything—but the aversion was unmistakable. She’d been inside that room only once, just a couple of weeks before she dropped out of college. Maybe she simply associated the seventh room with that bad time in her life, the medical withdrawal, the hospital . . .
    “This is Daniel,” Lindsay said. The boy—who Marzi guessed was at least a year too young to be in the Red Room legally—smiled. “He’s an art student.”
    “Aren’t they all,” Marzi said.
    “Hey,” Jonathan said, then turned back to Marzi. “Any-way, I heard there’s a seventh room, with a desert motif. I guess you’d call it the Desert Room—”
    The whole world lurched around Marzi. Her first thought was “Earthquake!” but this was a wholly internal shifting. She felt as if the bones in her skull were moving, as if doors she’d always kept closed had been jerked wide open—her head felt full, overfull, like a barrel spilling over in a