The Ivory and the Horn n-6

by Charles de Lint

  I think I've figured out where they came from. I used to work for The Newford Examiner—I guess that makes me more like Superman than the Bat-guy, isn't that another laugh? And I guess I just blew any chance of maintaining a secret identity by revealing that much. Not that it matters. I was always pretty much a loner until I met Annie, and then most of our friends were hers. I liked them all well enough, but without our link with Annie, we've just kind of drifted apart. As for my family, well, they pretty much disowned me when I came out.

  So I was working for The Examiner, and before you ask, it's true: We make up most of the stories. Our editor starts with a headline like "Please Adopt My Pig-Faced Son" and the writers take it from there. But sometimes we let other people make it up for us. You wouldn't believe the calls and letters that paper would get.

  Anyway, a few months before Annie died, I find myself up in the mountains, interviewing this old hillbilly, woman who claims to have a fairy ring on her property— you know, one of those places where the Little People are supposed to gather for dances at night? I'd brought Annie with me because she wouldn't stay home once I told her where I was going.

  The interview goes a little strange— not the strange that's par for the course whenever I've been out in the field interviewing one of our loyal readers with her own take on the wild and the wacky, but strange in how it starts to make sense. Maybe it's because Annie's with me and fairy tales are her bread and butter. I don't know. But the fairy ring is amazing.

  It's deep in the woods behind the old lady's trailer, this Disneylike glade surrounded by enormous old trees, with grass that's only growing about an inch high— naturally; I check to see if it's been cut and it hasn't— and the mushrooms. They form a perfect circle in the middle of the glade. These big, fat, umbrella-capped toadstools, creamy colored with blood-red spots on them standing anywhere from a foot to a foot-and-a-half high. The grass inside the mushroom ring is a dark, dark green.

  I know, from having read up on them before coming out to do the interview, that fairy rings are due to the growth of certain fungi below the surface. The spawn of the fungi radiates out from the center at a similar rate every year, which is how the ring widens. The darker grass is due to the increased nitrogen produced by the fungus.

  None of which explains the feeling I get from the place. Or the toadstools. The last time I saw one like that was when I was still in Brownies— you know the one the owl sits on?

  "Do you have to believe in the fairies to see them?" Annie asks.

  "Land's sakes, no," Betsy tells her.

  She's this beautiful old woman, kind of gangly and pretty thin, but still robust and a real free spirit. I can't believe she's pushing eighty-two.

  "They have to believe in you," she explains.

  Annie nods like she understands, but the two of them have lost me.

  "What do you mean?" I ask.

  I'm not even remembering to take notes anymore.

  "It's like this," Betsy says. "You don't think of them as prissy little creatures with wings. That's plain wrong. They're earth spirits— and they don't really have shapes of their own; they just show up looking the way we expect them to look. Could be you'll see 'em as your Tinkerbells, or maybe they'll come to you looking like those Japanese robot toys that my grandson likes so much."

  "But the fairy ring," I say. "That's just like in the stories..."

  "I didn't say the stories were all lies."

  "So..." I pause, trying to put it all together— for myself now, never mind the interview. "What is it that you're saying? What do these earth spirits do?"

  "They don't do anything. They just are. Mostly they mind their own business, just like we mind ours. But sometimes we catch their attention and that's when you have to be careful."

  Annie doesn't say anything.

  "Of what?" I ask.

  "Of what you're thinking when you're around them. They like to give gifts, but when they do hand 'em out, it's word for word. Sometimes, what you're asking for isn't what you really wants."

  At my puzzled look Betsy goes on.

  "They give you what you really want," she says. "And that can hurt, let me tell you."

  I stand there, the jaded reporter, and I can't help but believe. I find myself wondering what it was that she asked for and what it was that she got.

  After a while, Betsy and Annie start back towards the trailer, but I stay behind for a few moments longer, just drinking in the feel of the place. It's so... so innocent. The way the world was when you were a kid, before it turned all crazy-cruel and confusing. Everybody loses their innocence sooner or later; for me and Annie it was sooner.

  Standing there, I feel like I'm in the middle of a fairy tale. I forget about what Betsy has just been telling us. I think about lost innocence and just wish that it doesn't have to be that way for kids, you know? That they could be kids for as long as possible before the world sweeps them away.

  I think that's why they came to me after Annie died. They mourn that lost innocence, too. They came to me, because with Annie gone, I have no real ties to the world anymore, nothing to hold me down. I guess they just figured that, with their gifts, I'd head out into the world and do what I could to make things right; that I'd make the perfect fairy crusader.

  They weren't wrong.

  The trouble is, when you can do the things I can do now, you get cocky. And in this business, cocky means stupid.

  Crouching there on the rooftop, all I can find myself thinking about is another bit of fairy lore.

  "The way it works," Annie told me once, explaining one of her stories that I didn't get, "is that there's always a price. Nothing operates in a vacuum: not relationships, not the ecology, and especially not magic. That's what keeps everything in balance."

  If there's got to be a price paid tonight, I tell the city skyline, let it be me that pays it.

  I don't get any answer, but then I'm not expecting one. All I know is that it's time to get this show on the road.

  4

  It starts to go wrong around the middle of August, when I meet this guy on the East Side.

  His name's Christopher Dennison and he works for Social Services, but I don't find that out until later. First time I see him, he's walking through the dark back alleys of the Barrio, talking in this real loud voice, having a conversation, except there's no one with him. He's tall, maybe a hundred-and-seventy pounds, and not bad looking. Clean white shirt and jeans, red windbreaker. Nikes. Dressed pretty well for a loser, which is what I figure he must be, going on the way he is.

  I dismiss, him as one more inner-city soul who's lost it, until I hear what it is that he's saying. Then I follow along above him, a shadow ghosting from roof to roof while he makes his way through the refuse and crap that litters the ground below. When he pauses under some graffito that reads PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS, I make my way down a fire escape.

  I want to tear out the heart of whoever spray-painted those words, but they're long gone, so I concentrate on the guy instead. I can see perfectly in the dark and my hearing's nothing to be ashamed of either. The wind changes and his scent comes to me. He's wearing some kind of cologne, but it's faint. Or maybe it's aftershave. I don't smell any fear.

  "I just want to know how you do it," he's saying. "I've got a success rate of maybe one in thirty, but you... you're just shutting them down, right, left and center. And it sticks. I can tell when it's going bad. Can't always do something about it, but I can tell. The ones you help stay helped."

  He's talking about me. He's talking to me. I don't get the impression he knows what I am— or even who I am and what exactly it is that I can do— but he knows there's something out in the city, taking back the night for those who aren't strong or old enough to do it for themselves. I've been so careful— I didn't think anybody had picked up on it yet.

  "Let me in on the secret," he goes on. "I want to help. I can bring you names and addresses."

  I let the silence hang for long moments. City silence. We can hear
traffic from the street, the vague presences of TVs and stereos coming out of nearby windows, someone yelling at someone, a siren, but it's blocks away.

  "So who died and made you my manager?" I finally say.

  I hear his pulse quicken. His sudden nervousness is a sharp sting in my nostrils, but he's pretty quick at recovering. He looks above him, trying to spot me, but I'm just one more shadow in a dark alley, invisible.

  "So you are real," he says.

  A point for him, I think. He didn't know until I just confirmed it for him. How many nights has he been walking through these kinds of neighborhoods, talking to the night this way, wondering if he'll make contact or if he's just chasing a dream?

  I make a deliberate noise coming down the fire escape and sit down near the bottom of it so that our heads are almost level. His heart rate quickens again, but settles fast.

  "I wasn't sure," he says after I've sat there for a while not saying anything.

  I've decided that I've already said enough. I'll let him do the talking. I'm in no hurry. I've got all night. I've got the rest of my life.

  "Do you, ah, have a name?" he asks.

  I give him nothing back.

  "I mean, what do people call you?"

  This is getting ridiculous.

  "What?" I say. "Like the Masked Avenger?"

  He takes a step closer and I tense up, but whether I'll fight back or flee if he comes at me, I'm not sure yet. The cat anima left me with a lot of curiosity.

  "You're a woman," he says.

  Shit. That's another bit of freebie information I've given him. I feel like just taking off, but it's too late now. I'm intrigued. I have to know what he wants from me.

  "My name's Chris," he says. "Chris Dennison, I work with Social Services."

  "So?"

  "I want to help you."

  "Why?"

  He shakes his head. "Christ, you have to ask that? We're in the middle of a war and the freaks are winning— isn't that enough of a reason?"

  I think of the child waiting in the dark for a boogieman that's all too real to come into her bedroom. I think of the woman whose last bruises have yet to heal, thrown across the kitchen, kicked and beaten, I think of the boy, victimized since he was an infant, turning on those weaker than himself because that's all he knows, because that's the only way he can regain any kind of self-empowerment.

  It's not a war, it's a slaughter. Fought not just physically, but in the soul as well! It's about the loss of innocence. The loss of dignity and self-respect.

  "What is it that you do to them?" he asks.

  I don't know how to explain it. Using the abilities with which the anima have gifted me, I could literally tear the monsters apart, doesn't matter how big and strong they are— or think they are. But I don't. Instead, I pay them back, tit for tat.

  But how do I do it? I'm not sure myself. I just know that it works. I look at this Boy Scout standing there, waiting for an answer, but I don't think he's ready to hear what I have to say, how everyone has a dreaming place inside them, a secret, private place that defines them. It's what I learned from Annie's stories. I just put that knowledge to a different use than I think Annie ever would have imagined someone could.

  "I turn them off," I say finally. "I go into their heads and just turn them off."

  He looks confused and I don't blame him.

  "But how?" he asks.

  I can tell it's not just curiosity that's driving him. What he wants is a weapon for his war— one that's more efficient than any he's had to work with so far.

  "It's too weird," I tell him.

  "I'm not a stranger to weird shit."

  I'm not sure I want to get into wherever that came from.

  "How did you figure out that I existed?" I asked to change the subject.

  He takes the bait.

  "I started to notice a drop of activity in some of our more habitual offenders." he says. "You know, cases where we're trying to prove that there's good reason to make the child a ward of the court, but we're still building up the evidence?"

  I didn't, but I gave him an encouraging nod.

  "It was weird," he goes on. "I mean we get more recants than we do testimony anyway, but when I investigated these particular cases I found that the offenders really had changed. Completely. I didn't make any kind of a connection, though, until I was interviewing a six-year-old boy named Peter. His mother's boyfriend had been molesting him on a regular basis, and we were working on getting a court order to deny the man access to the child and his mother as a forerunner to hopefully laying some charges.

  "The mother was working with us— she was scared to death, if you want the truth, and was grasping at straws. She claimed she'd do anything to get out of this relationship. And then she suddenly retracted her offer to testify. The boyfriend had changed. He was good as gold now. Peter confirmed it when I interviewed him. He was the one who told me that he'd quote, 'seen a ninja angel who'd stolen away all of the boyfriend's badness.' "

  I remembered Peter. He'd come into the room and caught me as I was getting up from his mother's bed, putting on my gloves. I almost bolted, but I didn't want to leave a different kind of night fear in the little tyke's head, so I told him what I'd done, couching the information in words I thought he'd understand. He'd been really brave and hadn't cried at all.

  "He said he'd keep the secret," I say.

  "Give the kid a break. He's only six."

  I nod.

  "Anyway," Chris says, "something clicked for me then. It seemed... well, impossible, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. What if there really was someone out there that could do what Peter had said his angel had done? I've been fighting the freaks for years with hardly anything to show for it. It's heartbreaking work."

  I nod again. I've got a hundred percent success rate myself, but there's only so many places I can be at one time. I know all about heartbreak.

  "I felt like a fool walking around out here, trying to get your attention, but I just had to know. And if it was real, I wanted a part of it."

  I think of the anima that came to me all those long months ago.

  "It's not something that can be shared," I tell him.

  "But I can help, can't I?"

  "I don't think that's such a good—"

  "Look," he breaks in. "How do you figure out who to hit? I'll bet you just skulk around outside windows, hoping to get lucky. Am I right?"

  Too right, but I don't answer.

  "I can provide you with names and addresses," he says.

  I remember him saying hat earlier. It's part of what drew me down from the rooftops to hear him out.

  "You won't have to waste your time guessing anymore," he goes on, voice so damn eager. "With what I give you, you can go right to the known offenders. Just think of how much more effective you can be."

  It's tempting. Oh, who am I kidding? It's another gift, as unexpected, but as welcome, as those the anima gave me.

  "Okay," I tell him. "We'll give it a try."

  I barely get the words out of my mouth, then he's dragging a folded sheet of paper out of the pocket of his jacket.

  "These are just some of the worst, ongoing situations that we've got on file," he begins.

  My heart sinks. There must be fifty names and addresses on that one piece of paper.

  So many monsters.

  5

  The relationship works better than I think it might. I was working blind before, hanging around on fire escapes and ledges outside windows, crawling down from rooftops, listening, watching, until I got a fix on one of the monsters. And even then I had to be careful. Not every domestic argument leads to spousal abuse. Not every child, crying in the lonely dark, has been molested.

  I'm also careful with the tips I get from Chris. I may have taken on the roles of judge and jury, but I always make sure that I'm really dealing with a monster before I step into his head and turn him off. But Chris's information is usually good. We don't just use what he's collected on his o
wn, either. He takes what we need from all the files in his office, his and the other caseworkers', as well as from Children's Aid and the like, to avoid suspicion falling on him the way it might if all the monsters I dealt with came from his caseload.

  If Chris could make the connection, then so could someone else— someone perhaps not as sympathetic to my particular working methods. I've no idea how I'd deal with prison. I think the gifts of the anima would make it a thousand times worse for me. I think I'd rather die first.

  A few weeks into our partnership, Chris asks me what got me started with all of this. I don't know what to say at first, but then I just tell him that I lost a good friend which leaves him with the impression that it's revenge motivating me. I let him believe that, even if it's not exactly true. What killed Annie isn't something anyone can fight against.

  It's funny. I never think of Annie looking as she did when she died. It's like my mind's dosed off the image of how frail she became toward the end. She was just skin and bones, a pale, pale ghost of herself lying there in the hospital ward. Chemotherapy had stolen that gorgeous head of hair, but she refused to wear a wig.

  "This is who I am now," is all she'd say.

  When I think of her, I see instead the woman I fell in love with. She could have been a model for one of those nineteenth-century painters whose work she so admired: Rosetti, Burne-Jones, Dixon— that crew. She was beautiful, but more importantly to me, she completed me. Until I was with Annie, I never felt whole. I was just an observer going through life, never a participant, which might be the reason I became a journalist.

  I remember telling her that once and she just laughed.

  "I don't think so, Jaime," she said. "If you really just wanted to report on life, you wouldn't have worked for The Examiner. I think, secretly, there's a novelist living inside you, just dying to get out. Why else would you be drawn to a job that has you making up such outlandish stories, day after day?"

  Who knows what we secretly want— I mean, really, seriously want? I knew that with Annie I had everything I could ask for, so I had no more need for secrets. When I came out, it didn't raise an eyebrow among my coworkers. The only people who changed toward me were my family. Ex-family. Can you get a divorce from your flesh and blood? To all intents and purposes, I certainly have.