Moonheart

by Charles de Lint

  “What about him?”

  “Well . . . I mean, aren’t we going to do anything about what happened to him?”

  “What would you suggest?” Damn, Madison thought. He was beginning to sound too much like Williams.

  Collins studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll get that last box,” he said.

  “Dan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’ve closed the book on Tucker‌—that’s all I know. That doesn’t mean I won’t be doing what I can for him. And that goes for anyone who wants to lend a hand.”

  Collins nodded. “I understand, sir. . . . I could use a ride home if you’re going my way. I live on Elgin. If you take the Driveway up by the Canal . . . it’s a nice ride.”

  Right by Tamson House, Madison thought. He waved at the paperwork on his desk. “This’ll take me a couple of hours,” he said.

  “Hey. I’m in no hurry. I’ve got a few things to clear up before my transfer comes through anyway.”

  “I’d appreciate the company,” Madison said.

  He nodded to Collins as the constable left, then returned to stare at the files on his desk. Well, here was one for the books. Deskbound Madison hitting the streets again. He drew open a drawer on the left side of his desk and took out a .38 Smith & Wesson in a worn shoulder holster. Christ, he hoped he wouldn’t have to use this thing. Then again, considering the bizarre turns this project had taken recently, the gun probably wouldn’t be much use even if he had to use it.

  “Big place,” Madison remarked.

  He and Collins stood in Central Park looking at Tamson House. It was just going on twelve-thirty, Friday morning. There still was no word on Tucker, Traupman or Maggie. Nothing on any of them.

  “Weird place,” Collins said. He lit up a fresh Pall Mall from the end of his butt, then ground the butt under his heel. “Not a light on. Nothing. Well, Superintendent?”

  “Call me Wally. I’ve got a court order here from Judge Peterson to search the premises. If no one answers . . .”

  “Yeah. Well, no one’s answered. Trouble is I don’t think even a court order’s going to make much difference. We . . . ah . . . already gave it a try earlier this evening‌—when you sent me down to check out the Inspector’s car. But I’m willing to give it another go if you are.”

  Madison shrugged. “We’ve come this far. What’ve we got to lose?”

  Crossing the park, they made for the House. All we need, Madison thought, is for someone to come by as we’re going in. Williams would have his balls if he found out. But there was no way he was leaving Tucker in there. If Tucker was even in there.

  “Take a look, Superin . . . ah, Wally.”

  Collins shone a pencil flashlight in a window. Madison pushed up against the sill. The .38 was uncomfortable under his arm. His sportscoat wasn’t tailored to fit the gun and, even with his jacket open under his overcoat, it was still a tight fit. His hip was bothering him tonight, and his cane was getting in his way. . . . Peering inside, he tried to make out the features of the room, but the flashlight’s thin beam didn’t pick up anything.

  “Room’s empty,” he said. “Not even any furniture.”

  “They’re all like that,” Collins said. “At least on the bottom floor. But they’re not just empty. It’s more like there’s nothing there.”

  “And this ‘force field’?”

  “Watch.”

  Collins moved to the nearest door, pulling a jackknife from his coat pocket.

  “These’re old doors, see?” he said. “All you’ve got to do is slip the blade in between the door and the frame . . . like this. Hook it behind the bolt‌—they’re angled on these locks‌—and pull the blade forward.”

  He finished the movement, tugging on the doorknob as he did. The door didn’t budge.

  “They’ve got it bolted on the inside,” Madison said.

  Collins didn’t reply. He shone the penlight on the end of his knife’s blade to show a black scoring on the steel.

  “That . . . ?” Madison began.

  “Wasn’t there before. Something burned it. I could feel a jolt go up my arm when I was working the blade in.”

  “How about the windows?”

  “Same thing happens with the latches.”

  Madison shook his head. “This just doesn’t make any sense. How can there be nothing inside all these rooms? John‌—Inspector Tucker‌—described the place to me. Said it was loaded with antiques, books, furniture. . . .”

  “There’s nothing there now.” Collins shook out and lit a new cigarette. “We’ve got ourselves one weird problem here.”

  “But a . . . force field? It’s like something out of a science fiction movie, for Christ’s sake!”

  Collins bent down and hefted a good-sized rock. “What do you think?” he asked, indicating the window.

  Madison didn’t even stop to think about it. “Break it,” he said.

  Taking off his coat, Collins wrapped it around the stone to muffle the sound of the impact somewhat. The glass didn’t break with the first blow. A star of fine lines appeared where he’d hit the window, with long cracks emanating across the glass. He drew his arm back for a second blow, then paused, staring at the glass.

  “Je-sus!”

  “What is it?” Madison demanded.

  He shone the narrow beam of the penlight onto the window and felt his stomach muscles tighten. The crack lines in the glass were withdrawing back to the point of impact. As they watched, the cracks smoothed and the window became whole again. The two men stared at each other, neither quite willing to admit to what they’d seen.

  Madison grabbed another rock and, heedless of the noise the crash would make, flung it through the window. The rock tore a hole in the glass with a satisfying shattering sound that the night seemed to swallow very quickly. But there was no sound of glass falling to the floor inside the House. No sound of the rock hitting the floor. Collins leaned forward to reach for the latch. As he started to push his hand through the hole in the glass, a bluish-green light flared around his hand. He flung himself backward, cradling the hand against his chest. His eyes watered from the pain and he sank slowly to his knees. Madison dropped to his side.

  “Dan!” he cried.

  “S’okay.” Collins gritted through his teeth. “A little . . . shock. That’s all.”

  “Let me have a look.” Madison gently pried the constable’s arm away from his chest and shone the penlight on his hand. The skin was peeled and red as though from a burn. The fingernails were black.

  “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” he said, helping Collins to his feet.

  “But the . . . Inspector. . . .”

  Madison glanced up at the House. It reared up into the night skies like some behemoth; almost he could feel the House watching them, waiting for them to try to gain entry again.

  “Tucker’s going to have to look out for himself for now,” Madison said. “There’s no way we’re going to get into that place. We don’t even know for certain that he is in there.”

  As he led Collins across the park, he wondered how he was going to explain this if word filtered up to the Solicitor General’s office, then decided he didn’t care. What they’d just seen was proof positive that Project Mindreach hadn’t been a waste of time. Only how was he going to convince Williams of that?

  Starting the car, he pulled out from the curb and headed for the Riverside Hospital. One thing was for certain, he told himself. He wasn’t going to let this lie. Too many men had been hurt to ignore this. And now, now that he knew for himself that the paranormal abilities they’d been investigating in Project Mindreach weren’t just some bureaucrat’s way of wasting the taxpayers’ money as he thought it’d been . . .

  He shuddered to think what that kind of weaponry could do in the hands of terrorists and other malcontents. Impenetrable safehouses. Minds that could steal secrets from right out of your head, or fry you with a thought. God alone knew what else these people were capable of. />
  Maybe Williams wanted the project scrubbed. Fine. He’d just let Williams go on thinking that it had been. But he promised himself this: He wasn’t going to let this thing go until he had all the answers for himself. And then . . . when he had enough documentation to support his claims . . . well, he’d go right over Williams’s head if that was what it was going to take to get some action.

  Why was Williams so intent on closing down the project? Madison suddenly remembered something else, something Tucker had asked him before he’d disappeared: “You find out how a nobody like Hogue got hired to head this project. . . .”

  Madison had gone over Hogue’s file earlier this evening and hadn’t found anything in it to make Hogue stand out over any number of other possible candidates. Was that it then? Had Project Mindreach been Williams’s private project, set up for his own reasons, and now that his boy Hogue was out of the picture, he wanted to shut it all down?

  Well, it didn’t matter. He was going to get to the bottom of it. And if it got in the way of Williams’s career‌—that was too bad for Williams. He should have thought of that before he got his hands dirty. Because, the more Madison thought about it, the more it made sense. Williams was playing games and Project Mindreach was one of the pieces. Maybe the whole PRB itself.

  Great. So who was he going to go to with what he had right now? Madison shook his head. First some documentation, something hard. Then he’d go after Williams.

  Chapter Three

  “I’ve never had rabbit stew first thing in the morning before,” Kieran said, mopping up the last of it with a chunk of flat bread.

  “I would hardly call noon ‘first thing in the morning’,” she replied.

  They’d slept late, only waking when the sun that washed Ha’kan’ta’s Glade of Study had become too hot to sleep under. A brisk swim in the river that ran below her lodge served to cool them down and wake them up.

  The experiences of the previous night still hung between them, drawing them close. Where yesterday Ha’kan’ta had seemed like a wise woman, unattainable, someone he hadn’t even thought of making love with, today Kieran looked on her as a companion, a lover that he couldn’t imagine not being with. And the other experience‌—the time spent with his totem, the raven that he could still feel stirring inside him, dark-feathered and wise‌—that had left his every sense stretched taut.

  Just looking at Ha’kan’ta set tingles running through him. Today he wanted to know what had made her who she was, how her thoughts ran behind those startling blue eyes, the where and when and how and why of her.

  “Have you spent time in my world?” he asked suddenly.

  “Some. My ancestors came from your world.”

  Kieran smiled. “Ah! Those blue eyes!”

  “My grandfather was a man from across the Great Water‌—yellow-haired and blue-eyed. His name was Hagan Hrolf-get.”

  “Sounds like a Viking. How long ago was that?”

  “Many, many winters. He was washed up to shore and my grandmother rescued him from the sea. Her name was May’is’hyr and she was, like I am, a drummer-of-the-bear. They lived together in an old stone tower in a place my people called Where-the-Land-Ends‌—lived there with Taliesin Redhair.”

  As she spoke the bard’s name, she studied his face for a reaction, but Kieran only smiled.

  “I’ve given up all designs on your precious bard,” he said. “I’ll leave him in Sara’s capable hands.”

  At the mention of Sara’s name, Ha’kan’ta grew thoughtful. “I wonder,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Well, I always remembered Taliesin as being so sad. When I asked my father about it once‌—he and the bard were very close, closer than Taliesin was to my grandparents even‌—he told me that Taliesin was sad because he was waiting for a ghost that never came.

  “ ‘I never saw her myself,’ he told me, ‘but your grandparents knew her‌—for one day and a night. She came on the Night of Hunting Spirits.’ He said her name was Little-Otter, so I always thought she was one of my people. But now I’m not so sure.”

  Kieran nodded. “It could’ve been Sara. If she went back in time to meet Taliesin, she might have seemed like a ghost to him. Weird.”

  “I never had the courage to ask Taliesin about her myself. He became withdrawn as he grew older. When my father was young, they roamed the woods and Taliesin was as wild as my father was then. But while he’d remained youthful in appearance for many seasons, he began to age quite rapidly before he died.

  “ ‘The years fell upon him like winter snows covering a tree stump,’ was how my father put it.

  “It’s sad, isn’t it?” she said. “To think of him waiting all that time for her and she never returned to him. I wonder why she didn’t go back.”

  “Maybe that’s still going to happen,” Kieran said. “Though I’m not sure. I find this time traveling a little unsettling. Nom de tout! It makes my head spin, just trying to work it all out.”

  Ha’kan’ta nodded; her mood had changed. “We need to speak of Mal’ek’a,” she said suddenly.

  “But the raven told me . . . told us . . . that it wasn’t our struggle.”

  “Still, the quin’on’a set us on the hunt.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Kieran said. “I don’t think they really expected us to accomplish anything. I don’t think they even thought we could find Mal’ek’a, let alone do anything about it. They just wanted us out of the way. The thing we have to ask ourselves is why?”

  Ha’kan’ta sighed. “Now this is a thing that makes my head spin. Surely there were more simple methods to accomplish that‌—if such was their intent.”

  “Not all hyped up like we were. We really wanted to go after him‌—remember?”

  Ha’kan’ta was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft. “I still do.”

  “But . . .”

  “I know,” she said before he could continue. “I know what my totem told me. But Mal’ek’a has brought too much pain for me to let it go unpunished. It was Mal’ek’a’s tragg’a that slew my father, Kieran. How could I face him when we meet again in the Place of Dreaming Thunder, if I had done nothing?”

  Kieran reached over and took her hand, holding it tightly between his own. “It won’t solve anything,” he said, knowing the emptiness of his words as he spoke them.

  “Together we could defeat the monster,” Ha’kan’ta said. “Together we are strong. Strong enough even to slay the Dread-That-Walks-Nameless.”

  “And if our totems take back our strength because we’re going against their wishes? What then?” He felt a tension grow between them and added: “I’m not trying to back down, Kanta. It just doesn’t feel . . . right.”

  “Then what do you say on this matter?” she asked, her voice sounding very formal to Kieran’s ears.

  “We go back to see the quin’on’a.”

  “And then they will not be pleased. They gave us a thing to do.”

  “If I have my choice between displeasing the quin’on’a or my totem, I think I’ll opt for the quin’on’a.”

  “They can be dangerous.”

  “But together . . . we’re strong. Remember?”

  Ha’kan’ta nodded. “I think you are right. Given a choice, I too would rather anger the quin’on’a than my totem.” Warmth returned to her eyes, quick as a spring shower. “Forgive my doubting you. I thought‌—but it is not important. It was ill thought. We know each other well in certain ways, and yet we know so little of each other.”

  “That’s something we’ll have to work on.”

  Ha’kan’ta smiled. “I think I will enjoy ‘working on’ it. Yet before we begin that. . . .”

  “We go see the quin’on’a,” he finished for her.

  “I will summon Ak’is’hyr and see if he will bear us to their lodge,” she said.

  She closed her eyes, brow furrowing as she sent out a mental summons for the big moose. Kieran sat back, watching her,
glad that the moment of awkwardness between them had passed so quickly. Because if it came right down to it, he’d go against his totem’s wishes if he had to. It was a funny thing the way he felt about her. He lifted his hand, fingering the small braids that she’d woven into the hair on either side of his forehead. Lord lifting Jesus, but it felt good to be in love.

  In the hills above the quin’on’a lodge, Sins’amin, the tribe’s Beardaughter, and her War Chief Tep’fyl’in walked under the pines.

  “I should have realized,” Sins’amin said softly. “Time is a strange beast, with as little sense as a turtle. And as unyielding in its flow as a turtle’s shell.”

  Tep’fyl’in shrugged. “Prophecies have always been open to question,” he said. “Why should this one be any different?”

  “Because this one we need.”

  Sins’amin sighed. The prophecy lay unspoken between them. When the stag’s daughter bears the moon’s horns, it ran, then will the quin’on’a regain their lost forests.

  Once the tribesfolk of the World Beyond honored the quin’on’a with tobacco and rituals. In those days the quin’on’a knew the forests of the World Beyond as well as they knew those of the Otherworld. But then the Europeans came, the round-eyed herok’a with their gift of lies and their need to claim for their own the land that only Kitche Manitou could lay title to, and the quin’on’a were forced to withdraw into the Otherworld.

  They withdrew as their counterparts in Europe had withdrawn before them. The quin’on’a were the first to go, but the others followed‌—the manitous, the little mysteries, the honochen’o’keh‌—until Grandmother Toad’s something-in-movement lay thin in the forests of the World Beyond. Without the belief of the tribesfolk to sustain it, the sen’fer’sa diminished. In time, even the forests of the Otherworld would be empty.

  “We grow old, my Red-Spear,” Sins’amin said. She paused and took hold of Tep’fyl’in’s arm. “We that never knew age. We wither as the tribesfolk drive us further and further from their minds. Without their belief, we will be nothing. Most of them have forgotten the ways into the Otherworld. Year by year their drummers grow fewer. We need them to return to the old ways that we may be sustained by their belief. And without Taliesin Redhair’s craftdaughter to open the way for us, we have no hope.”