The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  I visited Pinky once a week, that was all I had to look forward to.

  And I had my dreams.

  The whole time me and Hector was seeing each other, I never had me no more of them wolf dreams. And even after he up and left me, I didn’t have me nothing that I’d be remembering come morning. But once they took Pinky away, them dreams come back again.

  I call ’em dreams but they always felt like more. It was liking being alive, only in a different place. I’d be running through the woods and fields, all my senses big and intense, the unfamiliar body of the wolf like an old friend. You see different when you’re an animal, hear different, and lordy lordy, do you use your nose different. There’s whole stories written on every smell you take in.

  And then there’s the hunt: the chase and the kill. I guess it answered to the hunger in me, to that piece of darkness I found inside me the night I cut my brother Del and set myself free. I couldn’t go around killing things in my day-to-day life—though there were customers in the copy shop that sore tried my patience a time or two—so I killed ’em here, in my wolf dreams.

  I wasn’t much good at the hunting at first. Partly it was me fighting the wolf’s nature—it knew what to do, but I had my own ideas, ’cept the wolf knew its limitations and I had to learn them. I couldn’t hunt the big game. For that you needed a pack. And those damn field mice and voles and the like weren’t easy to catch. But I got me the hang of it. I liked the crunch of all them little bones, but it weren’t satisfying in the long run. I knew I needed me some serious meat.

  So I needed a pack. Hell, not just for the hunting, but ’cause I was lonely, too. Not for friends, and talking and going out and the like, but for the idea that I wasn’t the only thing like me in the world.

  I don’t rightly know where they come from, but I called and they showed up, five or six of ’em, all bitches, ready to hunt. At first I didn’t know if they was like me, dreaming ’bout being a wolf here, or if they belonged to this place and I just called ’em to me from wherever they’d been running afore.

  I know what you’re thinking. Where’d I ever get the idea them dreams could be taking place in some other place that’s just as real as what’s right here in front of us? A body went and told me that and I’d think somebody put a stop payment on their reality checks. But I’ll tell you this: I knew that place was real. Just someplace else. And the way I come to figure that for certain was when I realized one of them wolf bitches had Pinky’s eyes.

  So whiles I can’t rightly say where the others come from, I can pretty much guess how I got Pinky. It was just me missing her so bad. I must’ve pulled her out of her own dreams and into my own. Into this place that sometimes feels more real than the world where my boyfriend’s dead and my best friend’s in prison and I ain’t nothing but a nobody. Thing was, I didn’t know if Pinky knew and it wasn’t something I was prepared to go asking her. It wasn’t that I was scared of looking foolish in front of her. I been foolish and a lot worse in front of her. It was that she might look at me and not know what I was talking about. That all these nights we’s a-running in the dreamwoods together are just something I’m making up in my sleep.

  But maybe six months after they put her away, I come visiting Pinky like I always do. I’m regular as clockwork, there whenever she’s allowed a visit. It’s hard looking at her through the window, the glass all dirty and scratched, talking on a damn phone, but what’s the option? Not being able to look at her at all? Not being able to talk to her and let her know somebody on the outside cares for her?

  “You ’member those dreams you used to have?” she asks after we been through the how-dos and all. “’Bout wolves and such?”

  I get a funny feeling. Nothing bad, just a kind a itch, deep in my stomach.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Well, I been having ’em, too.”

  I don’t say anything for a long moment. I look at her through the glass. There’s a moment when I see the wolf in her face, then it’s gone like it never was.

  “I know,” I tell her. “They’re real, them dreams. Don’t ask me why or how, ’cause I can’t say. But nights when we’re sleeping, you and me, somehow we’re out running them woods at the same time.”

  Now it’s her turn to just be a-looking at me awhiles, not saying a thing.

  “You ain’t shittin’ me?” she finally says.

  “I ever lied to you afore?”

  “You held out a time or two.”

  “Well, I ain’t holding out now,” I tell her.

  She sits back in her chair and that old shit-kicking grin I remember from afore we growed up and learned too much about the world, damned if it ain’t just a-sitting there on her lips. It’s the first time I seen her smile in longer’n I can remember, and I grin back, but it makes my heart hurt all the same. Seeing that ghost of the old Pinky just ’minds me how many years they’re gonna keep her locked up in this place.

  “Well, if that ain’t the damnedest thing,” she says. “Last night we was hunting …”

  She lets her voice trail off, a question sitting there in her eyes.

  “Some kinda deer,” I say, “but its pelt was dark as a crow’s wing.”

  She nods, satisfied. “But the blood was sweet when we took it down.”

  I have to laugh.

  “You testing me?” I ask.

  “Hell, Raylene,” she says. “What do you think? If this don’t sound like the craziest damn thing you ever heard of, then what is? Course I’m testing you. Testing myself, when it come to that.”

  “It’s real,” I tell her.

  “I’m beginnin’ to get the picture,” she says. “So who are the others we’re running with?”

  I shrug. “Don’t likely know. Either they come from that place, or they’re women like you and me: miserable and looking for something more’n what they got, ’cause what they got ain’t worth squat.”

  “And it don’t matter noways,” she says.

  “That’s right. So long’s you and me are there together.”

  There’s more we coulda said, but the screw come by then, telling us that our time was up. I say good-bye and lay the palm of my hand on that dirty glass. Pinky does the same on her side and it’s like we’re touching each other’s palms. Then she lets them take her back to her cell and I take myself on home.

  The dreams are better after that. We don’t get all gooshy about the other wolf bitches we’s running with, but we make time to goof off with each other, banging shoulders, nipping at each other, fighting these little mock battles, just generally. carrying on. Stuff we can’t do through the glass of the prison waiting room.

  The next time I visit, she says, “Do you ever get the feelin’ there’s more to that place than them woods we’re a-running?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like there’s better things to hunt,” she says. “Sometimes when we’re chasing one of them deer I get a whiff of something that makes every bit a me curl up inside and just start in a-vibratin’.”

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “I know just what you mean. Something old and … special.”

  I don’t say “magic,” ’cause that takes me too close to memories of my sister, but it’s what I’m thinking.

  “So next time we catch that scent …” Pinky says.

  “We’ll give it a whirl,” I tell her.

  It’s not that night or the next. It’s not for a couple a weeks. But we finally do catch that scent again and we leave off the deer we’re running and follow that new smell. We track it a long time, track it till we’re in someplace we ain’t never been before. I don’t mean to let on like we know everything about these dreamlands, since it ain’t like we been everywhere or nothing. It’s just different here. You can feel it straightaway—a warning prickle in the back of your neck, like when you step across the invisible border of Stokesville back home and suddenly you’re the only white face on the streets. Ain’t nobody threatening you, outright, but the potential for trouble’s lying t
hick any which way you turn.

  It’s like that here, ’cept it ain’t exactly trouble you can feel, or not necessarily trouble. More like the hush that comes over you when you walk into a great big ol’ church. Don’t matter if you believe or not, you still feel the press of some big unseen presence weighing down on you. Here it starts with the trees. They just get bigger and older, the woods darker and deeper. Makes the deep ol’ woods back home seem like no more’n an echo. The air tastes like it’s been flavored with a shot of whiskey, smoky and wild, and the light’s subdued, got the feel of late evening about it. I get the sense it’s always like that here.

  We never do catch what we’re chasing. We never even grab us a peek of it. But we know we’re on to something, so the next night, and every night after that, we head straight for them twilight woods and cast for that critter’s scent. Some nights there’s nothing. Some nights the scent’s too old to be worth the bother of tracking it. But every once in a while we get us a fresh noseful and we’re hot on the trail. When we finally lose it, it ain’t like what we’re chasing doubled back or turned out to be wilier’n us or nothing. Instead the scent just kinda fades away, like that critter just up and wished itself someplace else.

  We don’t give up altogether on our other hunting. We bring down them deer and such, but always in the back of our minds—leastwise it’s in the back of Pinky’s and mine—is that wild scent and how one day we’re actually gonna grab us a peek at whatever it is we’re chasing, see what it is and take it down.

  “How come we’re always wolves in that place?” Pinky asks one of the next times I’m visiting her in the prison. “You’d suppose, it bein’ a dream’n all, we could be any damn thing we’d want.”

  I shrug. “It ain’t something I ever chose. Just how it turned out, I reckon.”

  “Gimme a choice,” she says, “and I’d want to be just like we are. People.”

  “It’d be harder to hunt then.”

  “Not if we had us some guns.”

  “I suppose,” I say.

  But that don’t seem right to me. It ain’t like I’m soft on the animals we’re chasing in that place, thinking that it wouldn’t be fair or something. It’s that the running and the tracking, and then finally tearing at ’em with tooth and claw, that’s what makes me feel so alive over there. Just up and shooting something don’t have near’ the same appeal.

  “So do you think them deer are dreamers, too?” Pinky asks.

  “I never thought about it,” I tell her. “I suppose they could be.”

  She gives a slow nod. “So I wonder if’n you were to die there, do you die for real? I mean, do you just not wake up in your bed some mornin’ or what?”

  “Don’t matter to me,” I say. “I’d rather take that chance than not have them dreams at all.”

  She gives me another of them slow nods, like she’s doing some deep thinking and she’s not altogether right here in the moment with me.

  “I wonder if we should feel bad for them,” she says. “The deer, I mean. If they’re dreamers like us.”

  “Do you?”

  “Naw. Leastways, not when we’re bringin’ ’em down. But thinking ’bout it now, I ain’t so sure how I feel. I mean, if they’re dyin’ for real and all, maybe what we’re doin’ ain’t right.”

  I shrug. “They shoulda chose a tougher body.”

  “But we didn’t choose. What makes you think they did?”

  “So what are you saying? We should stop a-hunting?”

  She shakes her head. “No, I’m just thinkin’ is all. You do a lotta thinkin’ in a place like this.”

  “Prison’s done made you all philosophical,” I tell her, aiming to make her smile.

  It don’t come close to working. She gets this odd look, part hangdog, part I don’t know what. Sad, but fearless, I guess.

  “Prison does a lot a things to you,” she says finally.

  I think about my six months in county, while here she is, doing her years, and I find I don’t have nothing much to say ’bout nothing no more.

  Then one night we catch a glimpse of a white flank and the scent’s so fresh it tastes hot when we draw it in. We been hunting this one for hours now, getting closer all the time. It’s taking us so deep into this other place that the land’s changing around us again, the forest thinning and the ground rising underfoot, getting craggy and steep, granite outcrops pushing up outta the ground like some ol’ monster’s bones. We get another glimpse—some kinda horse, standing there high on a crag, looking back at us—and then it’s off again.

  One of the pack barks, a high, sharp sound, and we go swarming up that mountainside.

  It’s been months since we started in on hunting whatever this critter is and tonight the air’s thick with promise. We get a fourth or fifth wind—I’ve lost track by this point—and we’re just flying up that steep ground, a pack of ghost wolves, driven by the wind.

  Way up on that mountainside, it turns into a canyon that cuts between two cliff faces. By now we’re crazy with the heat of its scent, all blood and fire, and go pouring in after it. The canyon twists and turns and suddenly there it is, boxed up against a dead end, the cliffs too steep for it to go mountain-goating up them, and it don’t fade away neither. But this ain’t no goat, and it ain’t no horse neither. It’s something out of a storybook. White as a sheet in the moonlight, with that long spiraling horn rising up outta its brow.

  The pack fans out, pauses, savoring the moment.

  I don’t know ’bout the others, but I’m pinned by the sight of that horn. For one long moment, I can’t move, I can’t think, I can’t do nothing at all.

  The unicorn grabs its chance to try and bolt past us, but it’s too late and then we’re all over it.

  We lose one of the pack to its hooves, another gets gutted by the horn. This ain’t nothing like the deer we’ve been hunting, but we don’t even consider backing off. And then our teeth are snapping at its neck and the tendons in the back of its legs. We’re tearing at its throat.

  The first taste of its blood and it’s all over.

  That blood’s like nothing you can imagine. It burns, but it fills you up like you’re in some cathedral and God’s stopped by for a visit or something. The next time I see her at the prison, Pinky says it’s like the best high she ever had with the added bonus that you don’t crash when you’re coming down. I don’t know ’bout that, but I’ll tell you this. Taste it once and you’re always yearning for more.

  We take that critter down and we’re on it like hounds on a coon, just a-tearing it to pieces. We’re rolling in its carcass, bathing in the blood, chewing the hot meat from its flanks and throat. Something fills us like the heart of a star and we feel big as the mountains around us. Like we could take one step and it’d cover a hundred miles. When the frenzy finally dies down, we’re looking at each other, grinning, eyes laughing. We don’t even consider the two of the pack we lost in the fight. We’re just thinking, where can we get us more of this?

  Meanwhiles, in the real world, where Pinky’s in prison and Hector’s still dead, I go through the motions of being normal, leastwise as normal as I ever been, and the years drag on by. I go to work. I go to the prison on visiting days. I ride the bus. I sit in my apartment. I keep up them little shareware programs, always working on new upgrades, new ideas.

  At one point I see the future in domain names for the Web, but a hundred folks was there afore me by the time I try and register me some and all the good ones—the ones someone’d pay decent cash for, I mean—well, they’re long gone. I try a few start-up companies, but I don’t really have the capital to make a go of them and I sure don’t have the luck of your Netscapes or Winamps and the like.

  Mostly, I make it through my days so I can go hunting at night.

  We’re always on the lookout for them unicorns now, but there’s a big gap and a far between in looking for something and finding it. I lose count how many we bring down, but I do notice how they get harder to track, and eve
n harder to kill.

  We keep getting new bitch wolves to replace the ones we lose in them hunts, but neither of us much care, so long as we got each other. And we take a licking or two our own selves. Pinky almost buys it one time, the horn of one a them critters going right into her chest. It’s only plain old damn fool good luck it don’t pierce an organ and kill her. For a long time after that, she’s recovering and we have to take it easy.

  Another time I take me a kick in the head and it plumb knocks me ass over paws and I’m out like a light. Pinky’s sure I’m dead, but by then the pack’s took down that critter we been chasing. She drags me over to the body, warns off them other bitches, and laps that blood up, from the unicorn’s throat into mine, though mine ain’t got no big holes torn in it.

  I come ’round real quick, like I wasn’t even hurt, and then we’re all rolling in the body, turning our gray pelts red.

  Oh, we have us a time in the dreamworld. Outside of it, not too much stands out over the years ’cept this one Thursday night, when I’m on my ownsome in the copy shop and I come across the piece on my sister. Somebody’s brought this magazine in, wanting some other article copied, but when I’m turning to the pages it’s on, I see her face looking out at me and I near tear the damn magazines to pieces.

  It’s like someone turned on a switch in my head. One minute I’m standing there at the copier, flipping through the pages, thinking ’bout some changes I’m gonna make in one of the shareware programs, the next I’m gone into that red killing haze that comes over me when I’m dreaming, just afore the pack’s taking down some critter we been running through the bush for most of the night. If she’d’ve been standing in front of me right then, I’d been happy to go at her throat with nothing but my teeth.