Briarpatch by Tim Pratt Read Online Free PDF Page B

world.” He waved as Darrin walked away.
    2
    Darrin went up the steps to the house, leaning his shoulder against the door to push it open, because the wood always swelled and stuck during the rainy season. He clumped up the narrow stairs to his apartment on the second floor of the big old house. Once upon a time it had been a single-family residence, but some decades ago it had been carved up into apartments, walls erected, rooms partitioned to create space for necessities, and as a result he had a narrow kitchen—far too much of which was taken up by a cranky old water heater—and an enormous bathroom with a shiny black-and-white tiled floor and a tub big enough for two.
    Darrin hesitated in the entryway to his office, where his computer sat humming, its enormous flat screen a leftover from his more prosperous days, its hardware once top-of-the-line but now growing ever more obsolete. Part of him wanted to plug in the digital camera and look at that photo of Bridget, the last picture anyone would ever take of her while she was alive. Another part of him wanted to put off the morbid enterprise for as long as possible. He went into the kitchen and sighed at the mess of tea bags, spilled sugar, dollops of honey, and splashes of cream on the counter. Echo had stopped by, apparently, and as always she’d left a little disaster behind. He tidied up the wreckage of her tea, and then noticed the red light flashing on the phone hanging on the wall by the refrigerator. He pressed the button and winced as Nicholas’s booming voice emerged: “Hey, fucker, did you forget we were supposed to have lunch today?” His tone was jovial, hiding irritation. “You missed out, the waitress was hot. She had that kinda geeky chunky-glasses-wearing thing you like going on. Give me a call, tell me you didn’t get crushed under a train or something, let me know how you’re going to make it up to me. Hope you’re all right.”
    Darrin sighed. Another person to tell about Bridget, another person to explain things to, and Nicholas would insist on cheering him up— incapable of letting misery and grief run their courses, he was all about
getting back to normal
, and though he was well-intentioned, Darrin didn’t look forward to coping with his sort of therapy.
    Darrin was hungry, having missed lunch, so he put together a sandwich and took it back to his desk. No point putting this off—he’d just obsess about it until he looked. He plugged the cable into his camera and waited while the computer imported the latest bunch of photos, about a hundred taken in the past two days. Darrin didn’t do much these days
but
walk around and take photos—unless he was hanging out with Echo, who wanted sex more often than he did, and dragged him to bars, and routinely beat him at video games—and as the thumbnail images flickered by during the import process they provided a sort of map of his recent days: there was the long stairway on the way to the lake, flanked by chipped cherub statues , and the crap-covered benches of the bird sanctuary on the far side, and the faded whimsy of the giant metal dandelion sculptures, and the gate of Children’s Fairyland, the little fairy-tale theme park, and the marquee of the Grand Lake Theater with its liberal protest signage alongside the names of the latest Oscar-courting melodrama movies, and ranked headstones at the cemetery down past Piedmont Avenue, and the remarkable intersection of half a dozen overpasses and pedestrian walkways criss-crossing above the freeway, whimsical and brute-concrete-functional all at once, and shots of the bay and the Marin headlands. And finally Bridget, in the red coat Darrin had bought for her, leaning against the railing on the Golden Gate Bridge just moments before she jumped, just a flicker across his screen before the computer started downloading the photos of the Wendigo.
    Darrin launched his photo software and opened the photo of Bridget. It was a good picture, clear, and he