The Ivory and the Horn n-6

by Charles de Lint

  It's a long time before someone stops, but when this guy does, he's going my way. He can take me right up into the mountains. I find myself wanting to apologize for the way I look, for the way I smell, but I don't say anything. I know if I try to say anything more than where I'm going, I'm just going to break down and cry. So I sit there and hold my book. I nod and try to smile as the guy talks to me. Mostly, I just look ahead through the windshield.

  I don't know what I'm expecting or hoping to find when I get there. I don't even know why I'm going. I just know that I've run out of other options.

  Without Annie, I don't know where to turn. Only she'd be able to comfort me, only she'd be able to help me reclaim my dreaming place. I've had to shut myself off from what's inside me, because when I step into my private place, I get no solace now; when I dream, I have only nightmares.

  What was my only haven is home to monsters now.

  9

  "Are you sure this is where you want out?" my ride asks.

  There's something in the tone of his voice that tells me he doesn't think it's exactly the greatest idea. I don't blame him. We're out in the middle of nowhere, and Betsy's trailer looks deserted. The lawn's overgrown and thick with leaves. Her vegetable and flower gardens are a jungle of weeds. The trailer itself was never in the greatest shape, but now shutters are hanging loose and the door stands ajar. From the road we can see that a thick carpet of forest debris has already worked its way inside.

  I guess I'm not really surprised. Betsy was an old woman. It's been over a year since I was here with Annie, and anything could have happened to her in that time. She could have moved. Or died.

  I don't like to think of her as dead. There are some people who deserve to live forever, and although I only met her that one afternoon, I knew that Betsy was one of them. Eternal spirits, trapped in far too transient flesh.

  Like Annie.

  My ride clears his throat in case I didn't hear him. This guy's so polite. I was lucky it was him that stopped for me and not some loser who thinks with his dick instead of his heart.

  Or maybe, considering, it was lucky for those losers. I've still got the anima's gifts; I just don't use them anymore.

  "Yeah, I'm sure," I tell him and get out. "Thanks for the ride."

  I stand by the end of Betsy's overgrown driveway and watch the car until it's out of sight. There's something in the air that calms me, smoothing all my nervous edges. No longer summer, not quite winter, everything just hanging between the two. I take it all in until I hear another vehicle coming up the road, then I dart into the woods, Annie's book clutched to my chest.

  The glade doesn't look anything like I remembered it, either, but I know it's just because I'm here in a different season. The surrounding trees have all lost their leaves and everything's faded and brown. Except for the fairy ring. The toadstools still stand in their circle, the grass is still a deep green, and there's not a leaf or twig lying within the circle.

  I know there's probably a sound, scientific reason why this is so, but I don't have access to the paper's morgue anymore to look it up, and besides, I've seen the anima. I'm more likely to believe that fairies are keeping the ring raked and tidy.

  I stand there, looking at it for a long time, before I finally step into the ring. I lay Annie's book in the middle and sit down on the grass.

  I don't know what I'm doing here. Maybe I thought I could call up the anima. Or Annie's ghost. But now that I'm here, none of that matters. All the confusion and pain that's sent my life into its downward spiral after I killed Newman just fades away. My pulse takes on the slow heartbeat of the forest. I close my eyes and let myself go. I can feel myself drifting, edging up on that dreaming place inside me that I haven't been able to visit for months because I know the monsters are waiting for me there.

  I'm just starting to get convinced that maybe there is a way to regain one's innocence when I realize that I'm no longer alone.

  It's neither the animal-headed fairy women nor Annie's ghost that I find watching me from the edge of the ring, but Betsy. I think for a minute that maybe she's a ghost, or a fairy woman, but then I see how frail she is, the cane she's used to get here, how her face is red from the effort she's made and her breathing is way too fast. She's as real as I am— maybe more so, because I don't know where I've been these last few months.

  We don't say anything for along time. I watch her lean on her cane and slowly catch her breath. The flush leaves her face.

  "I read about your friend," she says finally. "That must have been hard for you."

  Tears well in my eyes and I can't seem to find my voice. I manage a nod.

  "It's always hardest for those of us who get left behind," she says, filling the silence that grows up between us. "I know."

  "You... you've lost someone close to you?" I ask.

  Betsy gives me this sad smile. "At my age, girl, I've just about lost them all." She pauses for a heartbeat, then asks, "You and your friend— you were... lovers?"

  "Does that shock you?"

  "Land's sake, no. I left my own husband for a woman— though that was years ago. Folks didn't look on it with much understanding back then."

  They still don't I think.

  "I think it makes it that much harder when you love someone folks don't think you're supposed to and she dies. You don't get a period of mourning. Folks are just relieved that the situation's gone and fixed itself."

  "But you still mourn," I say.

  "Oh yes. But you have to do your crying on the inside,"

  My eyes fill again, not just for Annie and me now, but for Betsy and her long-gone lover. Betsy looks like she's about to lose it too; her eyes are all shiny, and the flush is returning to her cheeks, but then she wipes her eyes on her sleeve and straightens her back.

  "So," she says, trying to sound cheery. "What brings you back? Another story for your newspaper?"

  I shake my head even though I know she's only being kind. She can see the state I'm in— I look like the homeless person I've become, not the reporter I was.

  "Remember when you were telling me about fairy gifts?" I say.

  She nods slowly.

  I want to tell her about the anima and what they gave me. I want to tell her about the ninja suit and climbing walls and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, looking for prey. I want to tell her about the dreaming places, and what I did to Newman when I pulled him into mine. I want to ask what the fairy women gave her. But none of it will come out.

  Instead I just say, "I like the idea of it."

  "You did a lovely job writing it all up in your article," Betsy tells me. "It had a different... ring to it."

  "As opposed to the stories The Examiner usually runs," I say dryly.

  Betsy smiles. "I've still got it in my scrapbook."

  That reminds me.

  "I didn't think you—" were still alive. "— Still lived around here," I say. "When I saw the trailer..."

  "After I had my stroke?" she says, "I went to live across the road with my friend Alice."

  I don't remember there being a place across the road from hers, but when she invites me back for tea, I see that it's because the evergreens hide it so well. As we walk up the little dirt track leading to it, Betsy tells me how it's a step up for her. I look from the run-down log cabin to her, the question plain in my eyes.

  "I doesn't have wheels," she explains.

  I never do any of the things that might have brought me up here. I don't talk about the anima to Betsy or what their coming into my life has done to me. I don't talk about how they might have affected her. I don't meet the anima again; I don't see Annie's ghost. But when Alice's daughter drives me back to the outskirts of the city where I can catch a bus, I realize the trip was still worthwhile, because I brought away with me something I hadn't had for so long I'd forgotten it had ever existed.

  I brought away some human contact.

  10

  In Frank Estrich's private place there's a small dog, trembling in th
e weeds that grow up along the dirt road where Frank's walking. The dog is just a mutt, lost and scared. You see them far too often in the country— some poor animal that's outlived its welcome in a city home, so it gets taken for a ride, the car slows down, the animal's tossed out—"returned to nature"— and the problem's solved.

  Frank found a stray the summer before, but his dad killed it when Frank brought it home and tried to hide it in the barn. And then his dad took the belt to Frank. His dad does that a lot, most of the time for no other reason than because he likes to do it.

  Frank always feels so helpless. Everybody's bigger than him: his father, his uncles, his brothers, the other kids. Everybody can rag on him and there's not a thing he can do about it. But this dog's not bigger than him.

  Frank knows it's wrong, he knows he should feel sorry for the little fella because the dog's as unwanted as Frank feels he is most of the time, but I can see in his head that he's thinking of getting his own back. And if he can't do it to those that are hurting him, then maybe he'll just do it to the dog.

  Doesn't matter how it cringes down on its belly as he approaches it, eyes hopeful, body shaking. All Frank can think of is the beating he got earlier tonight. Dad took him out to the barn, made him take down his pants, made him bend over a bale of hay as he took off his belt...

  I've already dealt with the father, but I know now how that's not enough. The seed's still lying inside the victim. Maybe it'll turn Frank into what his father calls a "sissy-boy," scared of his own shadow; more likely it'll make Frank grow up no different from his father, one more monster in a world that's got too many already.

  So I have to teach Frank about right and wrong— not like his father did; not with arbitrary rules and punishments, but in a way that doesn't leave Frank feeling guilty for what was done to him, in a way that lets him understand that self-empowerment has got nothing to do with what you can do to someone else.

  It's a long, slow process of healing that's as hard for me to put into words as it is for me to explain how I can step into other people's dreaming places. But it's worth it. Not just for the victims like Frank that I get to help, but for myself as well.

  What happened to me before was that I was wearing myself out. I was putting so much out, but getting nothing back. I was living only in the shadows, living there so long that I almost forgot there was such a thing as sunlight.

  That's what I do, I guess. I still step into the monsters' heads and turn them off, but then I visit the dreaming places of their victims and show them how to get back into the sunlight. The funny thing is, that when I'm with someone like Frank and he finally gets out of the shadows, I don't leave anything of myself behind. But they leave something in me.

  Dried blood and rose petals.

  Bird bones and wood ash.

  It's all just metaphor for spirit— that's what Annie would say. I don't know. I don't need to put a name to it. I just use it all to reclaim my own dreaming place and keep it free of shadows.

  A Tempest in Her Eyes

  Remember all is but a poet's dream,

  The first he had in Phoebus' holy bower,

  But not the last, unless the first displease.

  —John Lyly, from The Woman in the Moone

  1

  I've heard it said that there are always two sides to a story: There's the official history, the version that's set onto the page, then flied away in the archives where it waits for when the librarian comes to retrieve the facts to footnote some learned paper or discourse. Then there's the way an individual remembers the event; that version sits like an old woman on a lonely porch, creaking back and forth in her wicker rocker as she waits for a visitor.

  I think there's a third version as well: that of the feral child, escaping from between the lines, from between how it's said the story went and how it truly took place.

  I'm like that child. I'm invariably on the edge of how it goes for everyone else. I hear them tell the story of some event that I took part in and I can scarcely recognize it. I'd like to say that it's because I'm such a free spirit— the way Jilly is, always bouncing around from one moment to the next— but I know it's not true. The reason I'm not part of the official story is because I'm usually far from civilization, lost in wildernesses of my own making, unaware of either the library or the porch.

  I'm just not paying attention— or at least not paying attention to the right thing. It all depends on your perspective, I suppose.

  2

  September was upon us and I couldn't have cared less, which is weird for me, because autumn's usually my favorite time of year. But I was living through one of those low points in my life that I guess everyone has to put up with at one time or another. I went through the summer feeling increasingly tired and discouraged. I walked hand in hand with a constant sense of foreboding, and you know what that's like: If you expect things to go wrong, they usually do.

  I hadn't met a guy I liked in ages— at least not anyone who was actually available. Every time I sat down to write, my verses came out as doggerel. I was getting cranky with my friends, but I hated being home by myself. About the only thing I was still good at was waitressing. I've always liked my job, but as a lifelong career choice? I don t think so.

  To cheer me up, Jilly and Sophie took me to the final performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Standish. The play was a traditional production— Lysander and Demetrius hadn't been rewritten as bikers, say, and the actors had performed in costume, not in the nude. Being a poet myself, I lean toward less adventurous productions because they don't get in the way of the words.

  I'd been especially taken with the casting of the fairy court tonight. The director had acquired the services of the Newford Ballet for their parts, which lent the characters a wonderfully fey grace. They were so light on their feet, I could almost imagine that they were flying at times, flitting about the stage, rather than constrained by gravity to walking its boards. The scene at the end where the fairies sport through the Duke's palace had been so beautifully choreographed that I was almost disappointed when the spotlight narrowed to capture Puck in his final speech, perched at the edge of the stage, fixing us in our seats with a half-mocking, half-feral gaze that seemed to belie his promise to "make amends."

  The actor playing Robin Goodfellow had been my favorite among a talented cast, his mobile features perfectly capturing the fey charm and menace that the idea of fairy has always held for me. Oberon was the more handsome, but Puck had been simply magic. I found myself wishing that the play was just beginning its run, rather than ending it, so that I could go back another night, for his performance alone.

  Jilly and Sophie didn't seem quite as taken with the production. They were walking a little ahead of me, arguing about the authorship of Shakespeare's works, rather than discussing the play we'd just seen.

  "Oh, come on," Sophie was saying. "Just look at the names of some of these people: John Thomas Looney. S. E. Silliman. George Battey. How can anyone possibly take their theories seriously?"

  "I didn't say they were necessarily right," Jilly replied. "It's just that when you consider the historical Shakespeare: a man whose father was illiterate, whose kids were illiterate, who didn't even bother to keep copies of his own work in his house... It's so obvious that whoever wrote the plays and sonnets, it wasn't William Shakespeare."

  "I don't really see how it matters anyway," Sophie told her. "It's the works that's important, in the end. The fact that it's endured so long that we can still enjoy it today, hundreds of years after he died."

  "But it's an interesting puzzle,"

  Sophie nodded in agreement. "I'll give you that. Personally, I like the idea that Anne Whately wrote them."

  "But she was a nun. I can't possibly imagine a nun having written some of the bawdier lines."

  "Maybe those are the ones old Will put in."

  "I suppose. But then..."

  Trailing along behind them, I was barely paying attention and finally just shut them out. My own
thoughts were circling mothlike around Titania's final promise:

  Hand in hand with fairy grace

  Will we sing and bless this place.

  That was what I needed. I needed a fairy court to bless my apartment, to lift the cloud of gloom that had been thickening over me throughout the summer until it had gotten to the point where when I looked in the mirror, I expected to see a stranger's face looking back at me. I felt that different.

  I think the weather had something to do with it. It rained every weekend and day off I had this summer. It never got hot— not that I like or missed the heat. But I think we need a certain amount of sunshine just to stay sane, never mind the UV risk. Who ever heard of getting cabin fever in the middle of the summer? But that's exactly the way I felt around the end of July— the way I usually feel in early March, when I don't think I can take one more day of cold and snow.

  And it's just gotten worse for me as the summer's dragged on.

  The newspapers blame the weird weather on that volcano in the Philippines— Mount Pinatubo— and say that not only did the eruption mess up the weather this year, but its effects are going to be felt for a few years to come. If that's true, I think I'll just go quietly mad.

  I started wondering then about how the weather affects fairies, though if they did exist, I guess it might be the other way around. Instead of a volcano causing all of this trouble, it'd be another rift in the fairy court. As Titania put it to Oberon:

  ... the spring, the summer,

  The chiding autumn, angry winter change

  Their wonted liveries, and the mazéd world

  By their increase now knows not which is which.

  And this same progeny of evils comes

  From our debate, from our dissension,

  We are their parents and original.

  It certainly fits the way our weather's messed up. I heard it even snowed up in Alberta a couple of weeks ago— and not just a few flurries. The skies dumped some ten inches. In August.