The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “I suppose.”

  They all fell silent again.

  “So what were you two arguing about when I came in?” Wendy asked.

  “Sophie wants me to tell Lou about my sister. But I don’t want the police involved. I don’t want to get her into trouble.”

  “But, Jilly—” Sophie began.

  “Especially not if she had to go through what I did. If I abandoned her to that.” Jilly shook her head. “Who’m I kidding? Of course that’s what happened. No wonder she’d be messed up.”

  “But you went through it,” Sophie said. “And you’re not messed up.”

  “Oh, please. All that crap’s been living inside my head for as long as I can remember.”

  “But you’re not going around hurting people because of it,” Sophie said.

  “I was just lucky,” Jilly told her. “I got help. Like in a fairy tale. But she didn’t.”

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything about her.”

  But Jilly wasn’t listening. “Did you know that after the accident—when I was still in a coma Joe brought in some magical healers to help me?”

  Wendy and Sophie both nodded.

  “But they said they couldn’t do a thing because first I had to fix that old hurt. Except how do you fix something like that? Never mind me dealing with what happened to me. There’s also what I did to Raylene. That’s not something that can ever be forgotten. Or forgiven.”

  Sophie started to speak, but then she just bent her head and took Jiily’s hand, giving it a squeeze.

  Wendy sighed. Of the three of them, she was the only one who didn’t have to deal with some horrible trauma left over from her childhood. The rules that made the world turn had all worked for her. She hadn’t had a brother who’d abused her, a mother who’d deserted her, or any of the horrible things that seemed to have happened to two out of any three of the women they knew.

  “Well, I agree with Sophie,” she said, reluctant to keep pushing at it, but knowing that someone had to. “I think you have to tell Lou. And you should tell Joe, too.”

  But Jilly was already shaking her head.

  “Why Joe?” Sophie asked.

  “Well, do you know anybody else who knows as much about the dreamlands?” Wendy replied.

  Sophie smiled. “Besides me, you mean?”

  “He knows different stuff. He doesn’t go there just in dreams, right? He’d know how Jilly’s sister can be like a wolf over there.”

  “If it is my sister,” Jilly said.

  “Right. Maybe he could figure that out, too.”

  Jilly shook her head. “I don’t want her hurt anymore.”

  “But what if she’s hurting other people besides you?” Wendy asked. “Maybe on some cosmic karma chart, you deserve penance for running off on your sister the way you did—though I, for one, don’t believe it. God, you were just a kid yourself. Look at all the years you were so messed up.”

  “That’s an excuse?”

  “No,” Wendy told Jilly. “That’s just a fact. But what if she’s hurting other people? Innocent people. Are they supposed to pay penance as well?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “So we have to tell.”

  “Oh, god, I don’t know,” Jilly said. “Can we leave it until tomorrow ? I just can’t think about it right now.”

  Wendy exchanged a quick glance with Sophie.

  “Of course we can,” she said.

  Jilly studied her for a moment. “Promise me you won’t do anything till after we’ve talked tomorrow.” She looked at Sophie as well. “Both of you.”

  “I won’t tell Lou,” Wendy said, “but I think Joe should know as soon as possible.”

  Jilly didn’t say anything for a long heartbeat, then finally gave a small nod.

  “Sure,” she said. “We can tell him. Though how you expect to find him, I don’t know. He’s gone deep into the dreamlands.”

  Wendy nodded. “That’s what Cassie said. But I’ll pass the word on to her—and,” she quickly added, “I’ll tell her not to talk to anyone else about it.”

  There was little to say after that, so Sophie and Wendy got ready to leave.

  “You’ll be okay by yourself?” Sophie asked.

  “As okay as I ever am these days.”

  Wendy’s heart broke to hear the resignation in Jilly’s voice. After they said their good-byes and were walking down the hall, she turned to Sophie.

  “You could look for him, too, couldn’t you?” she asked.

  Sophie shook her head. “I wouldn’t know how to start. But I can certainly put the word out when I go to Mabon tonight.”

  “We’ve got to help her through this,” Wendy said. “All of this.”

  Sophie gave a glum nod. She fit her hand into the crook of Wendy’s arm and the two of them left the rehab with their heads leaning together, trying to gather what strength and comfort they could from each other.

  2

  I’m so scared to go to sleep after Sophie and Wendy leave. I’m not even close to being ready to believe that my sister could be trying to kill me—either with a car in the World As It Is, or in the dreamlands as a wolf. I know people change, but that much? It doesn’t seem possible that the sweet kid I left behind when I ran away from home could grow up to become some kind of monstrous shapechanging killer. It’s too big a stretch and my mind can’t accept it.

  But whoever occupied the brain behind that wolf’s eyes sure hated me. That I have no trouble believing. And it makes me nervous about going to sleep. I mean, I know I can just wake up to escape her if I run into her again, but what if she follows me back this time? Is that possible? I know Joe can walk in and out of the dreamlands at will. What if I only surprised her that last time and she wasn’t quick enough to follow? Or what if she is quick enough, but she just hasn’t yet? Or maybe she already knows where to find me, the Broken Girl lying helpless here like some bedridden version of Little Red Riding Hood, and she’s just biding her time until she finally decides to come and get me here.

  I wish I hadn’t thought of that, because now I find myself straining at every odd sound I hear, imagining the click of a wolf’s nails on the marble floors. I can’t hide. I can’t get up out of this bed. I can’t even pull the bedclothes up over my head. And there wouldn’t be just the one wolf either, but a whole pack of them, making their way down the hall to my room.

  And this bugs me, too, because I’ve always loved wolves and now she’s got me scared of them. I know they’re predators and all, but I also know they don’t attack humans unless they’ve been provoked.

  But what did I ever do to provoke it?

  Sophie’s arguments come back to me and I’m full circle again, denying it could be my little sister Raylene, but I’m even more tired now than I was when Sophie was actually here for the conversation, my eyelids drooping like leaden weights, but my pulse working double time because of what might be waiting for me on the other side of sleep.

  I’m surprised I ever get to sleep at all. But when I do, when I step back into the once upon a time of my dreams …

  As I feel myself drifting away, I concentrate on that last place I was with Toby—high up in the branches of the biggest of the cathedral trees—because I feel I’ll be safe there, far from the reach of any wolf, shapechanger or otherwise. At least it sounds good in theory.

  Except what if she can just appear up in those branches the way I hope to?

  She has to have been here first, the logical part of my mind argues. That’s how it works. You can slip over and end up anywhere—the way people do when they’re dreaming, and then they barely remember it anyway—or you can decide where you want to go, but you have to have been there before to do that. And what are the chances she’s been there before?

  But if she’s a shapechanger, what’s to stop her from changing into human form and climbing up after me? Or taking the shape of a bird, for that matter.

  I fall asleep before my logic can find a way to make me feel
better about that and then it becomes a moot point anyway because, instead of finding myself safe in that cathedral tree, I’m on a hilltop with a strange building at my back, looking down at where an enormous forest starts at the distant foot of the slope and runs off into the far horizon. It takes me a moment to realize it’s the Greatwood I’m looking at. I’ve never seen it before from this vantage.

  I take my gaze from the panorama and study the slope around me. There’s such a jumble of rock and so many little ravines you could hide a dozen packs of wolves down there. When I don’t see anything move after long moments, I turn slowly to have a look at the building.

  There’s not much to see from where I’m standing. There are windows in its stone walls—three tiers of them, one for each story, I guess—but the glass is too dark for me to see in. The fieldstone walls themselves appear to have been raised from material gathered close at hand and there’s still plenty more of it to be found there, a quarry’s worth of loose rocks and small boulders scattered all the way down the slope of the hill before it disappears into the forest. The roof of the building is thatched and the only opening I can see in the wall is this large arch that appears to lead into a cobblestoned courtyard, though oddly it has no keystone.

  I give the slope and the forest a last look, then start for the building. A few minutes later, I step through the archway and into the courtyard. The space inside is large, maybe the size of a baseball diamond. There’s another arch directly opposite and large wooden doors in the walls on either side. Wooden benches are set against the walls and there’s a well in the center of the cobblestones. Higher up, the walls are studded with more windows, the glass all dark like the ones I saw outside. The lower ones have window boxes under them, overflowing with herbs and flowering plants.

  I walk over to the well and look down. I can’t see the bottom. The air in the courtyard is crisp and clean, but I can smell beer and things cooking: something spicy and the unmistakable aroma of fresh baked bread. Of the four doors, only two are open. Through the one to my right I can see stalls and bales of hay so I guess it leads to the stables. Through the one on the left I can make out a scattering of wooden tables with chairs set around each. My gaze lifts above the door and finds the sign hanging there:

  Inn of the Star-Crossed

  Now I know where I am. This is that building I saw from the branch of the huge cathedral tree I climbed when I was with Toby the other day.

  There doesn’t appear to be anyone around, but someone has to be cooking and baking, and maybe brewing beer. I want to call out, but I’m nervous about bringing the wrong kind of attention to myself. It’s all too easy to imagine wolves skulking in the shadows, or watching me from behind the dark panes of all those windows.

  I walk toward the door with the sign above it and step inside, blinking as my eyes adjust to the dimmer light. There’s a long wooden bar directly to my left. It looks like something out of a cowboy movie with a mirror the length of the bar on the wall behind it and all the bottles and glasses on the shelves in front of the mirror. As my eyes adjust to the light I realize that the liquid in those bottles are all the colors of the rainbow. Weird. I can’t imagine turquoise wine. Or blue whiskey.

  Farther to the left is a hearth with no fire in it. There are wooden booths like in a diner on either side of the hearth, more along the wall to my right. Paintings and tapestries hang from the walls—landscapes and old-fashioned portraits. Each table and booth has a couple of fat white candles on it, unlit. There’s no one sitting at any of the tables. No one behind the bar.

  I clear my throat.

  “Um … is anybody here?”

  There’s no reply, but I hear the sound of cloth brushing against cloth, as though someone’s shifting their position. Then I see that there’s a person sitting in one of the booths to the right of the hearth. I hesitate a moment, waiting to see if he or she’ll speak. When they don’t, I look around myself once more, then cautiously cross over to that booth, winding my way through the empty tables, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.

  The man sitting there watches me approach, but he doesn’t say a word. He has a glass filled with a blue liquid in front of him on the table. There are wet blue rings on the wood around the glass. The man is handsome, in a rough sort of way. Bad-boy handsome, Wendy’d say. The kind you see outside of pool halls, but not so much a loser as a bit of a romantic loner. He’d have a motorcycle and he’d smoke, but he’d probably have a paperback of Rimbaud in his back pocket. Or at least something by one of the Beats. Dark hair pushed back from his brow and clean-shaven. Blue-eyed with long dark lashes that most women would kill for. Lean, dressed all in black. The hand resting on the table beside his drink is slender and well formed, but it’s not a weak hand.

  “Um, hello,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you …”

  He keeps looking at me, but doesn’t give me any indication that he understands what I’m saying.

  “Do you speak English?” I try.

  He lifts his glass and has a drink, then sets it down to make a new blue circle to join the others.

  “Well, well,” he finally says. “Look what we have here. The mother of misery herself. Well, you’ve come to the wrong place, dearheart. Anybody who comes here is already full up on their own unhappinesses. No need for you to come ’round and peddle yours.”

  He has the kind of voice that immediately makes little catpaws go running up your spine. Low and resonant. Very personable, for all the nasty things he’s saying. I don’t want to like him, but I can’t help but feel drawn to him and that annoys me.

  “Do I know you?” I ask.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, if you’re going to be unkind, I think you should at least have a reason. Or are you just naturally mean-spirited?”

  The blue eyes regard me for a long moment before he says, “Though some might consider otherwise, I save my cruelty for those that deserve it.”

  Lovely. Mr. Congeniality here isn’t exactly a wolf with hate in her eyes, lunging at my throat, but he’s obviously not a member of my fan club either. This being immediately disliked by people and creatures I don’t even know is a novel and unnerving experience for me. It’s not that I’m perfect or think that everybody should like me or anything. But I’ve never made enemies very well, and whenever I have hurt anybody, however inadvertently, I make a point of apologizing and trying to set things right as soon as I can. Always have.

  Except for that one time when I ran away from home …

  That makes me wonder. Maybe he’s mad at her and has the two of us mixed up with each other.

  “Do you know my sister?” I ask.

  “Heaven help us. There are two of you?”

  “Look,” I say. “What’s your problem? So far as I know, I’ve never met you before so you don’t know anything about me.”

  “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?”

  “What I think is you’ve either got me confused with someone else, or you’re just a rude person.”

  “They call me the Tattersnake,” he says then. “Does that help jog your memory?”

  The name rings a bell, but I can’t quite place it. It think it’s lost in one of my little memory holes until it suddenly comes to me.

  “You’re Toby’s friend,” I say.

  Except what had Toby said?

  You can’t be friends with the Tattersnake. That’s like trying to be friends with the stars or the moon—ever so filled with the potential for disappointment. Because they’re so bright, and they hang so very high.

  “No, not friend,” I add before he can make some new nasty comment. “Toby said you weren’t the sort of person you can be friends with.”

  The eyebrows lift and fall and there’s a mocking look in those blue eyes of his.

  “Is that what he said?” he asks.

  There’s just a hint of danger in his voice and I start to feel nervous again. I keep myself from looking around, but where is everybody? Shouldn’t the
re at least be an innkeeper?

  “I’m a friend of Joe’s,” I tell him, using the name as a talisman, hoping that it will mean something the way it did with the cousins I’ve met in the Greatwood. “You know.” I have to think a moment to retrieve the name Jolene has for Joe. “Animandeg.”

  “But Joe’s not here, is he?”

  I don’t let my fear show, unless you count the trembling in my legs, but his gaze is locked on my face so I’m guessing he doesn’t see the way they’re shaking.

  “Yeah, well, it’s been fun,” I tell him.

  Before I can start to back away, he makes a negligent wave to the bench on the other side of the booth from where he’s sitting.

  “But, please,” he says “Don’t go off pouting now. Have a seat. Share some of your wisdom with me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, come on. Everyone’s talking about you down in the Great-wood: the dreaming girl with the big spirit light burning in her. They’re all so sure your arrival means something grand.”

  He’s having fun with this, but his amusement only goes so far as the mockery in his eyes. I don’t need to be a mind reader to know that he’s got some serious “I hate you” jones that he needs to express. I want to be out of here before it goes from verbal to physical.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him. “I don’t know anything.”

  “And yet you’re so very free with your advice and wisdom. Oh, and your help. You’re so very helpful as well, aren’t you? Or at least for so long as it suits you.”

  I start to back up. I don’t know who he’s got me mixed up with—my sister, some complete stranger—but I don’t like where this is going. Not at all.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  There’s such menace in his voice that it stops me dead in my tracks.

  “I …”

  I’m not quite sure what to say.

  But before he gets the chance to make some new nasty remark, a voice calls out from behind me.

  “Rue! You’re not bothering my customers, are you?”