Free The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl by Tim Pratt Page B

heavy rain.
    The room . . . changed. Not physically, not
fundamentally,
but there was a sort of visual superimposition, as if the barely visible ghost of another place were occupying the same space as the Red Room.
    Marzi looked around, and mixed in among the hipsters and drunks she saw the dim forms of grizzled cowboys and worn-down women. The ghost of a honky-tonk piano stood in the far corner, played by a man with an absurd mustache and sleeve garters, and she could almost make out the strains of his jangly song. Marzi squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to banish the hallucination, but when she looked again, the ghostly forms were even more substantial, now sepia-toned like figures in old photographs.
    The Red Room was being overtaken, or replaced, or
merged
with another saloon, a place with a name like the Bucket of Blood, the Trail Blossom, the Saddle Sore. The carpet occasionally gave way to patches of plank flooring, and the real bar seemed to float atop another bar, one made of a splintery board laid across stacked crates. The young, efficient bartenders were joined by a hulking, slow-moving man polishing a beer glass with a filthy rag, and as Marzi watched the real bartenders passed through the sepia-tone phantom without any of them taking notice.
    This ghost saloon wasn’t quite like the ones you saw in movies—the floor was too dirty for that, the whores were too fat, and the men had rotten teeth. This was a scene from
history
—or from Marzi’s comic,
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl,
somehow transformed from black ink on white paper into full-color reality.
    Jonathan, Lindsay, and Daniel were all still with her, sitting around the table, which now shared space with a ghostly table of pitted wood. Their clothes seemed to shift and change before her eyes, changing to shadowy period garb and back to normal again. At the moment, Jonathan wore a black shirt, black jeans, and a black hat, along with an onyx-and-silver bolo tie. Lindsay wore a red, ruffled Miss Kitty saloon-girl dress. Daniel was dressed like an Eastern dandy, a banker, maybe, who’d walked into entirely the wrong bar, and now sat stupidly with his back to the room, drawing glares from the other customers.
    If Marzi stared hard at any particular place in the Red Room, the ghostly saloon receded entirely, but still swarmed in her peripheral vision. She was . . . having an event. A stress reaction. Maybe even the beginnings of a seizure. But she held on to that oldest hope for health and happiness:
If I ignore what’s wrong, maybe it will go away.
    “Daniel, tell them what you told me, about what happened in Dr. Maltin’s class,” Lindsay said, beaming in drunken benevolence. Her clothes shifted back to normal when Marzi looked at her.
    “Oh,” Daniel said, unaware of the grimy prospectors watching him, the cowboys spitting spectral tobacco juice toward his chair. “I came into class late, and—”
    The crowd of cowboys and miners suddenly began moving, clearing away from the middle of the bar, rushing toward the far walls. Worse yet, the
real
people were moving, too, more slowly and apparently unconsciously, just drifting aside to clear a path from the front door to Marzi’s table.
    Marzi moaned softly. Jonathan leaned closer. “You okay?”
    No. She wasn’t okay. She was cracking up, seeing things—this was even worse than her experiences from two years before.
    Someone approached from the front door, though Marzi hadn’t seen it open, and strolled across the floor unhurriedly. Where his boots touched, the carpet seemed to disappear, replaced by the rough planks of the ghost saloon. The figure was coming right toward them.
    It was the Outlaw.
    The principal villain of Marzi’s comic was an ancient sorcerer of indefinite origin, known by many names, most recently called the Outlaw. He embodied the spirit of savagery and bloodshed in the West, and he masterminded most of the nefarious activities that took place on the far side of the