The Ivory and the Horn n-6

by Charles de Lint

  "I know what you were really like," she tells him. "I know you were trying to help the kids in your own way."

  For the children.

  "And I know why Macaulay killed you."

  He stands in the misting rain, the need still plain in his eyes, the curious bundle held against his chest. He doesn't try to approach her anymore. He just stands there, half swallowed in mist and shadow, watching her.

  "What I don't know is what you want from me."

  The rain runs down his cheeks like tears.

  "For God's sake, talk to me,"

  But all he says is, "Do it for the children. Not for me. For the children."

  "Do what?"

  But then she wakes up.

  ***

  Angel dropped by Jilly's studio on that Sunday night. Telling Jilly she just wanted some company, for a long time she simply sat on the Murphy bed and watched Jilly paint.

  "It's driving me insane," she finally said. "And the worst thing is, I don't even believe in this crap."

  Jilly looked up from her work and pushed her hair back from her eyes, leaving a steak of Prussian blue on the errant locks.

  "Even when you dream about him every night?" she asked.

  Angel sighed, "Who knows what I'm dreaming, or why."

  "Everett does," Jilly said.

  "Everett's dead."

  "True."

  "And he's not telling."

  Jilly laid down her brush and came over to the bed. Sitting down beside Angel, she put an arm around Angel's shoulders and gave her a comforting hug.

  "This doesn't have to be scary," she said.

  "Easy for you to say. This is all old hat for you. You like the fact that it's real."

  "But—"

  Angel turned to her. "I don't want to be part of this other world I don't want to be standing at the checkout counter and have to seriously consider which of the headlines are real and which aren't. I can't deal with that. I can barely deal with this... this haunting."

  "You don't have to deal with anything except for Everett," Jilly told her. "Most people have a very effective defensive system against paranormal experiences. Their minds just automatically find some rational explanation for the unexplainable that allows them to put it aside and carry on with their lives. You'll be able to do the same thing. Trust me on this."

  "But then I'll just be denying something that's real."

  Jilly shrugged. "So?"

  "I don't get it. You've been trying to convince me for years that stuff like this is real and now you say just forget it?"

  "Not everybody's equipped to deal with it," Jilly said. "I just always thought you would be. But I was wrong to keep pushing at you about it."

  "That makes me feel inadequate."

  Jilly shook her head. "Just normal."

  "There's something to be said for normal," Angel said.

  "It's comforting," Jilly agreed. "But you do have to deal with Everett, because it doesn't look like he's going to leave you alone until you do."

  Angel nodded, slowly. "But do what? He won't tell me what he wants."

  "It happens like that," Jilly said. "Most times spirits can't communicate in a straightforward manner, so they have to talk in riddles, or mime, or whatever. I think that's where all the obliqueness in fairy tales comes from: They're memories of dealing with real paranormal encounters."

  "That doesn't help."

  "I know it doesn't," Jilly said. She smiled. "Sometimes I think I just talk to hear my own voice." She looked across her studio to where finished paintings lay stacked against the wall beside her easel, then added thoughtfully, "I think I've got an idea."

  Angel gave her a hopeful look.

  "When's the funeral?" Jilly asked.

  "Tomorrow. I took up a collection and raised enough so that Everett won't have to be burried in a pauper's grave."

  "Well, just make sure Everett's buried with his boots on," Jilly told her.

  "That's it?"

  Jilly shrugged. "It scared Macaulay enough to take them, didn't it?"

  "I suppose..."

  ***

  For all she's learned about his hidden philanthropic nature, she still feels no warmth towards the dead man. Sympathy, yes. Even pity. But no warmth.

  The need in his eyes merely replaces the anger they wore in life; it does nothing to negate it.

  "You were buried today," she says. "With your boots on."

  The slow smile on the dead man's face doesn't fit well. It seems more a borrowed expression than one his features ever knew. For the first time in over a week, he approaches her again.

  "A gift," he says, offering up the newspaper-wrapped bundle. "For the children."

  For the children.

  He's turned into a broken record, she thinks, stuck on one phrase.

  She watches him as he moves into the light. He peels away the soggy newspaper, then holds up Macaulay's severed head. He grips it by the haloing blonde hair, a monstrous, bloody artifact that he thrusts into her face.

  ***

  Angel woke screaming. She sat bolt upright, clutching the covers to her chest. She had no idea where she was. Nothing looked right. Furniture loomed up in unfamiliar shapes, the play of shadows was all wrong. When a hand touched her shoulder, she flinched and screamed again, but it was only Jilly.

  She remembered then, sleeping over, going to bed, late, late on that Sunday night, each of them taking a side of the Murphy bed.

  "It's okay," Jilly was telling her. "Everything's okay."

  Slowly, Angel felt the tension ease, the fear subside. She turned to Jilly and then had to smile. Jilly had been a street kid once— she was one of Angel's success stories. Now it seemed it was payback time, their roles reversed.

  "What happened?" Jilly asked.

  Angel trembled, remembering the awful image that had sent her screaming from her dream. Jilly couldn't suppress her own shivers as Angel told her about it.

  "But at least it's over," Jilly said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Everett's paid Macaulay back."

  Angel sighed, "How can you know that?"

  "I don't know it for sure. It just feels right."

  "I wish everything was that simple," Angel said.

  ***

  The phone rang in Angel's office at mid-morning. It was Lou on the other end of the line.

  "Got some good news for you," he said.

  Angel's pulse went into double-time.

  "It's Macaulay," she said. "He's been found, hasn't he? He's dead."

  There was along pause before Lou asked, "Now how the hell did you know that?"

  "I didn't," Angel replied. "I just hoped that was why you were calling me."

  It didn't really make anything better. It didn't bring Robbie back, or take away the pain that Macaulay had inflicted on God knew how many kids. But it helped.

  ***

  Sometimes her dreams still take her to that street where the neon signs and streetlights turn a misting rain into a carnival of light and shadow.

  But the dead man has never returned.

  Bird Bones And Wood Ash

  It's a wonder we don't dissolve in our own bath water.

  —attributed to Pablo Picasso

  1

  At first, Jaime knows them only as women with the faces of animals: mare and deer, wild boar and bear, raven and toad. And others. So many others. Following her.

  They smell like forest loam and open field; like wild apple blossoms and nuts crushed underfoot. Their arms are soft, but their hands are callused and hard, the palms like leather. Where they have been, they leave behind a curious residue of dried blood and rose petals, tiny bird bones and wood ashes.

  In those animal faces, their eyes are disconcertingly human, but not mortal. They are eyes that have seen decades pass as we see years, that have looked upon Eden and Hades. And their voices, at times a brew of dry African veldt whispers and sweet-toned crystal bells, or half-mad, like coyotes and loons, one always rising above th
e others, looping through the clutter of city sound, echoing and ringing in her mind, heard only from a distance.

  They never come near, they simply follow her, watching, figments of post-traumatic stress, she thinks, until they begin to leave their fetish residue in her apartment, in her car, on her pillow. They finally approach her in the graveyard, when the mourners are all gone and she's alone by Annie's grave, the mound of raw earth a sharp blade that has already left a deep scar inside her.

  They give her no choice, the women. When they touch her, when they make known their voiceless need, she tells them she's already made the choice, long before they came to her.

  All she lacked was the means.

  "We will give you the means," one of them says.

  She thinks it's the one with the wolf's head who spoke. There are so many of them, it's hard to keep track, all shapes and sizes, first one in sharp focus, then another, but never all at the same time. One like a woodcock shifts nervously from foot to foot. The rabbit woman has a nose that won't stop twitching. The one like a salmon has gills in her neck that open and close rhythmically as though the air is water.

  She must have stepped into a story, she thinks— one of Annie's stories, where myths mingle with the real world and the characters never quite know which is which. Annie's stories were always about the people, but the mythic figures weren't there just to add color. They created the internal resonance of the stories, brought to life on the inner landscapes of the characters.

  "It's a way of putting emotions on stage," Annie explained to her once. "A way of talking about what's going on inside us without bogging the story down with all kinds of internal dialogue and long-winded explanations. The anima are so... immediate."

  If she closes her eyes she can picture Annie sitting in the old Morris chair by the bay window, the sunlight coming in through the window, making a pre-Raphaelite halo around the tangle of her long hennaed hair as she leans her chin on a hand and speaks.

  "Or maybe it's just that I like them," Annie would add, that pixie smile of hers sliding across her lips, her eyes luminous with secrets.

  Of course she would, thinks. She'd like the animal women, too.

  Jaime isn't so sure that she does, but she doesn't really question the women's presence— or rather the reality of their presence. Since Annie's death, nothing is as it was. The surreal seems normal. The women don't so much make her nervous as cause her to feel unbalanced, as though the world underfoot has changed, reality curling sideways into a skein of dreams.

  But if the women are real, if they can help...

  "I'll do it," she tells them. "I'll do it for Annie."

  The rat-snake woman sways her head from side to side. Her human eyes have yellow pupils, unblinking in her scaled features.

  "This is not about the storyteller," she says.

  "It is for all those who have need of a strong mother," explains the wild boar, lisping around her tusks.

  The ground seems more unbalanced than ever underfoot. Jaime puts out a hand and steadies herself on a nearby headstone. Annie's neighbor now. The scar inside is still so raw that it's all Jaime can do to blink back the tears.

  "I don't understand," she tells them. "If it's not about Annie, then why have you come to me?"

  "Because you are strong," the raven says.

  "Because of your need," the salmon adds.

  The mountain lion bares her fangs in a predatory grin.

  "Because you will never forgive them," she says.

  She lays her hand on Jaime's arm. The rough palm is warm and has the give of a cat's paw. Something invisible flickers between them— more than the warmth: a glow, a spark, a fire. Jaime's eyes widen and she takes a sharp breath. The lioness's gift burns in her chest, in her heart, in her belly, in her mind. It courses through her veins, drums in her temples, sets every nerve end quivering.

  One by one, the others approach. They hold her in their soft arms, touch her hands with their callused palms. Fairy godmothers in animal guises, bestowing their gifts.

  2

  It's a night in late July and Karl thinks he's dreaming.

  He's in that private place inside his head where everything is perfect. He doesn't have to be careful here. He can be as rough as he likes, he can leave a roadmap of bruises and cuts and welts, he can do any damn thing he wants and it doesn't make a difference because it's just in his head. He doesn't have to worry about his wife finding out, about what a neighbor or a teacher might say. Nobody's going to come around asking awkward questions because it's just in his head.

  Here's he's hard forever and children do exactly what he tells them to do or he punishes them. How he punishes them.

  Tonight's scenario has his youngest daughter tied to her bed. He's just come into the room and he's shaking his head.

  "You've been a bad, bad girl, Judy," he tells her.

  When she starts to cry, he brings his hand out from behind his back. He doesn't own a belt like this anywhere except for in his private place. The leather is thick, so thick the belt can barely bend, and covered with large metal studs.

  Karl's problem is that it's not his daughter there on the bed tonight. He just doesn't know it yet.

  I only caught the tail end of what really happened in Judy's bedroom earlier tonight. I heard her crying. I saw him zipping up his pants. I heard him remind her how if she ever told anybody about their special secret that bad people would take her and her sister away and put them in a horrible prison for bad girls. How they'd have to stay there forever and it, would break their mother's heart and she would probably die.

  I wanted to kill him right then and there, but I waited. I clung to the side of the tenement's wall and shivered with anger, but I've learned how to be patient. I've found a less messy way to deal with the monsters. I don't do it for them; I do it for those who are left behind. To save them the trauma of waking to find their loving husband/father/boyfriend/uncle disemboweled on the floor.

  I wait until he's asleep, then I come in through his bedroom window. I pad over to the bed where he's lying beside his sleeping wife and step up, balancing my weight like a cat, so there's no give in the mattress, no indication at all that I'm crouched over the monster, hands free from their gloves, palms laid against his temples. The contact, skin to skin, makes me feel ill, but it lets me step into his private place.

  It's only there, when he moves towards the bed with the belt, that I make myself known. I break the ropes tying my Judy-body to the bed as though they were tissue paper. When he looks at me he doesn't see a scared child's eyes anymore. He sees my eyes, the hot bear-rage, the unblinking snake-disdain, searing his soul.

  And then I take him apart.

  It's a tricky process, but I'm getting better, at it with practice. The first few times I left a vegetable behind and that's no good either. Some of these families can barely keep a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs. No way they can afford the chronic hospital care for the empty monster shells I left behind.

  So I've refined the process, emasculating them, making it impossible for them ever to hurt anybody again, but still functional. Barely. Scared of everything, including their own shadow. But no more likely to regress to their former selves than I am to forgive them.

  Karl's wife never wakes as I leave their bedroom through the window. I make it to the roof and I have to rest. It would be easier just to kill them but I know this way is better. It leaves me feeling weak, with a tear in my soul as though I've lost a piece of myself. I think I leave something behind each time— more than that anima residue of dried blood and rose petals, bird bones and wood ash. I leave some part of myself that I'll never be able to regain, but it's worth it. I just have to think of the sleeping child and know that, for her, at least, the monster won't be returning.

  I want a shower so bad it hurts, but the night's young and it's still full of monsters. That's what breaks my heart. There are always more monsters.

  3

  It's cold for a September night, co
lder still on the rooftop where I crouch, and the wind can find me so easily, but I don't feel the chill.

  I used to laugh at the comic books Annie would read, all those impossibly proportioned characters running around in their long underwear, but I don't laugh anymore. The costumes make perfect sense now. My bodysuit has a slick black weave with enough give to let me move freely, but nothing that'll catch on a cornice or in someone's grip. The Thinsulate lining keeps me warm, even below zero. Black gloves, lined hood and runners complete the outfit. Makes me look like one of those B-movie ninjas, but I don't care. It gets the job done.

  I draw the line at a cape.

  I never read superhero comics when I was a kid— not because they seemed such a guy thing, but because I just couldn't believe in them. I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn't he deal with some real problems? Why didn't he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him— if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, "God's will." And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good.

  When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn't, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn't believe his battles with criminals; superpowered geniuses and the like.

  I never believed in God either.

  If my business wasn't so serious, I'd have to laugh to see myself wearing this getup now, climbing walls like a spider, all my senses heightened; faster, stronger, and more agile than a person has any right to be. It's like— remember the story of Gwion, when he's stirring Cerridwen's potion and it bubbles up and scorches him? He licks off those three drops, and suddenly he can understand the languages of animals and birds, he has all this understanding of the connections that make up the world, and he can change his shape into anything he wants— which proves useful when Cerridwen goes after him.

  That's pretty well the way it is for me, except that I can't change my shape. What I've got are the abilities of the totem-heads the anima wore when they came to me. I just wish my fairy godmothers had made me a little smarter while they were at it. Then I wouldn't be in this mess.