The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  With a hop and a rustle the god was gone, leaving only quivering branches behind. Wire made a brief devotion to him and sat up in bed, wondering why he had been watching her.

  You never could tell what gods were up to.

  It was a promising morning. To the north, mist coiled on the lower slopes of the mountains. To the west, early sunshine glinted on the waters of False Creek and English Bay. South lay the Forest, its dark heart of pine and cedar wrapped in gloom. Wire wasn’t much looking forward to hiking in there; she would definitely have to choose her charms with care. Of course, it might not be necessary to have extra luck on her side. Maybe Raining would be easy to persuade. Maybe she would say, Wire, you are quite right. 1 see that now. Of course I should return to the Southside and put my marriage back together. Thank you so much for showing me my mistake.

  Wire laughed and headed for the shower.

  After shower and breakfast came the difficult task of choosing the right clothes for her journey. Wire dithered for some minutes, then closed her eyes and picked something at random, promising herself to wear whatever she grabbed. She came up with a charcoal vest she had been in love with a year ago, but was tired of now. She stuffed it back in the closet. Finally, forbidding herself to question the impulse, she pulled out a deep blue rayon skirt, shrugged into a matching shirt, and gathered her long black hair into a ponytail.

  Why would a god be interested in her? Of course, there had always been plenty of gods of the sort who hung around peering in women’s bedroom windows, if stories were true. Wire was twenty-seven years old, with a body that pleased both her and the men of her acquaintance. Perhaps that was all the god was interested in. An alarming thought. The affections of gods were hard to avoid, and sometimes dangerous.

  She pushed that worry aside for later and stood before her cedar treasure chest, wondering what to take as a good luck charm. Her wisdom teeth in their little bone box? Not quite right. A vial of crushed poppy dust? A pierced silver dollar dangling from a red cord? With a smile she picked up the little fluted seashell with the god inside that she had found on the beach when she was four, and held it to her ear. But the shell was silent; the little humming god was gone.

  Wire felt crushed. Her oldest, dearest charm was just a shell, now; an empty bone house where some sea creature once had lived. No luck to anyone anymore. “Well, damn,” she said. Her eyes teared a little and she wiped them with her hand.

  It wasn’t as if there had always been magic in the world. Raining’s father told her once that there was hardly any magic from the 1600’s to World War II. When it started coming back, people had been scared of it. For years nobody believed in the golems that had manifested themselves in the concentration camps at Treblinka and Dachau, until the number of confirmed witnesses was too great, and the first minotaurs began appearing in America. Wire supposed it would have been terrifying to live then, with the magic creeping a little higher every year like the high-water mark of an endlessly rising tide, until the Dream, when Powers all over the world began to wake.

  But that was Wire’s world. And if it had been a desperate thing to feel the magic rise until the world you knew was drowning in it, was there not a different bitterness to living in an age when the magic was draining away? To watch the spirits leaching from their temples, one by one? To lift a shell that once a god had filled, and find it empty? Because that was what was happening, Wire was sure of it.

  Not many people here believed her yet, but that was because they didn’t look. They just wanted to wear their charms, hoard their luck, and get on with the day. Well, they would see. In a few more years the world would be so empty that even her busy fellows would notice the silence.

  Sadly Wire put back the shell.

  Next she picked up a gold locket Raining had given her, with Wire’s portrait etched on a piece of ivory. Raining hadn’t made it an especially flattering portrait: a profile, in cameo style, of Wire in middle age. Her hair was pulled back into an unattractive bun. The line of her jaw had begun to blur with fat. Wire had never found it a very lucky charm. The days she wore it she often felt sadder than usual, and more uncertain.

  She straightened and hung the locket around her neck. This day, of all days, she couldn’t afford to lose faith in Raining’s friendship. She pulled on her chunky black ankle boots and did up their lucky red laces, then grabbed her wool over-cape, in case it was drippy in the wood. She touched the locket with her fingertips, and said a quick travelling prayer.

  The path to Cedar House never went the same way twice. Sometimes, for a friend like Wire, it was a few quick minutes trotting through a pleasant birchwood to reach Raining’s house; other times, or for less welcome visitors, the way could wind for hours, or even days, through gloomy chambers of pine and red cedar and western hemlock. Wire grinned to herself, remembering Raining’s birthdays when they were girls: how Wire would step from the meadow onto what looked like a path snaking deep into the wood, only to find her foot falling into the parlor of Cedar House, and Raining waiting there for her, all greedy eyes and fingers.

  Today the path went on and on.

  The first part was always the easiest, a pleasant track winding through a copse of birch and poplar trees. Wire stopped for lunch just before noon, squatting down with her back against a skinny birch. She unpacked a meal of cold fried bread and smoke-cured salmon and two of last year’s apples, wrinkled and sweet.

  By the time she stood up, wet low-lying clouds were moving in from the sea: flat drippy-looking things like damp cloth, thickening gradually into a sodden grey quilt. The sun smeared and dwindled, mumbling as he drifted away from her. A cold wind sprang up, stealing the sun’s words and making Wire’s head ache. Each time she put a leg forward, the wind slipped through the split in her cape. Unhappy birch leaves shivered overhead.

  Turning a bend, Wire was startled by a narrow, deep channel with a stream running at the bottom of it. The water slid, cool and certain, under an old plank bridge and away between banks clotted with ferns. Wire stood for a moment on the bridge’s back, looking down. A dense coldness rose from the stream. Toppled trees had sunk into him along his length; tongues of yellow and green moss licked and curled around them like slow flames.

  Once when they were teenagers she and Raining had discovered this stream, and Wire had wondered out loud what it would be like to take him as a lover. It had seemed like an obvious question—sex was everywhere for her back then—but the comment had delighted Raining. Wire remembered the flush of pleasure she had felt, seeing the admiration in Raining’s bird-bright eyes. Later, when Raining showed her the sketches she had drawn of the stream’s smooth nakedness, Wire had shivered at how perfectly Raining understood her. How perfectly they understood one another.

  Which was why they would be friends forever. Raining could hate her, or she could hate Raining; often had, for a minute or a day. That didn’t change anything important. That didn’t change the way you felt her breath inside your chest.

  Shortly after Wire crossed the stream, the birchwood ended and the real Forest confronted her: a looming wood of mournful cedars and towering Douglas fir. She slowed, then stopped, reaching out to touch the last little birch. The light failed suddenly at the edge of the cedar wood; she could not see ten paces into its shadows. Raining had taken her through the cedars often enough, of course. But only a few times, in their rocky teenage years, had Wire had to plunge into the dark wood alone. “Come on, Raining,” she said out loud. “Don’t be like this.”

  The sky was grey and dreary. Birch leaves hissed and trembled around her. A thin strand of rain touched her cheek like a wet thread. The cedars creaked and sighed among themselves in dark, restless voices.

  Wire wished she could still hear the sun.

  Ch-ch-ch-ch-chk! Wire jumped at the sound of a beak drumming against wood. It was the woodpecker who had been at her window. He sat high on the trunk of the last birch tree. His head was cocked to watch her, and his bright black eyes gleamed. His beak gaped, lau
ghing.

  Wire thought. Presently she dragged a small folding knife out of her pocket and carefully cut a few black hairs from her head. These she tied around the lowest branch of the woodpecker’s tree. They fluttered there like strands from a broken spider web. She knelt to ask the Forest’s blessing. Mud and leafmold squelched beneath her knee. Then she was up on her feet again, slapping the dirt off her skirt. “Right,” she said. She touched her locket once for luck, and stepped inside.

  Evergreens rose around her like the ruined walls of an abandoned house. Old needles and darkness had choked off any ground cover but ferns, with here and there an isolated patch of salal or Oregon grape, or a sickly huckleberry bush. Between the chambers of cedar and Douglas fir, a few thin pines struggled for light, their trunks marked with trails of crusted sap. The air was musty and damp and still.

  The forest track shrank, pattering between the trees like a small animal, pausing to hem and haw over every turn and twist. Wire hadn’t heard his busy little voice outside, but here it seemed precious to her. The path paused; started to the left; changed his mind and doubled back to wind around an enormous cedar before hurrying off into the gloom. Wire took a deep breath. “Ready or not, here I come!”

  And really, she was thinking crossly two hours later, it was just like Raining to run into the wood and hide from her problems. Wire stumbled over a root and swore. Up ahead, the path paused and looked back, murmuring fretfully to himself. Wire squatted down to rub her bruised toe. Her legs felt heavy from too much walking and her head ached. It was always dark under the cedar wood, but it was getting darker.

  A glint of distant light caught Wire’s eye as she stood up. She stared through the gloom. Just when she had decided there was nothing there, she caught it again: a quick flash of yellow lamplight breaking through the trees. Cedar House. Relief rushed through her, even though she knew it might yet take the path hours to find the house, or days. But the house was there, and that was something.

  Mind you, she never felt entirely safe in Raining’s home. Many times Wire had been sleeping over and wakened from strange dreams to find no roof above her, but her bed lying under a canopy of dark branches. Overhead, a burning moon adrift in pewter-colored clouds, or a handful of glimmering stars.

  Once, creeping out of Raining’s room to use the bathroom in the dead of night, she had opened the door to find the hallway gone, and in its place only a narrow path between dark trees. She had stayed on the threshold for the longest time, rocking back and forth so her bare toes touched the dirt, staring at the distant flicker of the night-light in the bathroom, trying to work up the courage to walk there. She had closed the bedroom door and waited in the dark until her bladder forced her to try again. This time the hallway was back and the bathroom only a few steps away. She peed in messy haste and ran back to Raining’s room as if all the gods in hell were after her. She jumped into bed to lie cowering next to Raining’s small warm body for what seemed like hours. When she fell asleep at last, the cries of owls followed her into her dreams.

  Still, better to be in Cedar House than out here in the Forest, lost and alone.

  Wire dug a flashlight out of her skirt pocket. Her hands were shaking. She tabbed it on, wincing at the sudden glare. The path jumped, every root and jutting rock stark in the harsh light. Green moss smoldered down tree trunks and crawled over stumps, or hung in dull yellow strings where it had died. Beyond the edges of her light, the darkness was absolute.

  She forced herself to walk on.

  Once, when they were young, Raining had left her in the Forest. They were supposed to be playing hide and seek and Raining got mad because Wire ran too fast and always managed to reach home base without being tagged. So one time Wire dashed back to home base but there was no Raining there, just dust and dim light, and the gloomy cedars creaking overhead. She panicked and ran off the path, crashing through the wood until they found her an hour later, slumped against a tree and bawling her head off. Raining told her it was her own fault for leaving the path.

  Wire remembered that.

  The evening wind came up, making the big cedars creak and groan. She went faster. The beam from her flashlight jumped and jerked. She was right on the heels of the little path now, running him down so he only stayed a step or two ahead. She had to stumble and twist to follow him between the trees.

  A big branch lashed out and slapped her in the face.

  “Shit!” Wire wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, spitting out the taste of wet bark. She ran on, her breath ragged. Her whole mouth was tingling and salty with blood. She could feel her lip getting fat. Her footfalls thumped heavily into the muffled ground. She felt the darkness thicken and contract, waking up and turning its attention on her. She sprang forward.

  The startled path broke away and bolted into the Forest, leaving her. Twigs cracked and ferns rustled in his wake, and then fell silent. Wire swung her flashlight around, stabbing at the darkness. She was alone.

  She swung the flashlight around more slowly. Her shaking hands made nervous shadows. No sign of the path.

  All right. Think.

  Her batteries would last for days, if need be. There was plenty of water in the little streams that crisscrossed the wood. All she had to do was find one and follow it down to the sea. She could wait for morning, if necessary.

  Except nobody got out of the Forest. Not if it didn’t want them to. She was trapped.

  “Please, Rain,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here.”

  Chapter

  Four

  “I would never do that,” said a voice from the darkness. “Though I can see why you might be worried. I’m in the habit of leaving people lately, aren’t I?”

  “Raining!” Wire cried, spinning around. “Rain! You—you came for me. About goddam time, too.” She swung the flashlight beam toward Raining’s voice and caught a glimpse of her shoulder through a screen of branches. With the path gone, Wire had to push her way through a thicket of pine boughs. “I was on the path twelve hours, Rain. Until he bolted.”

  “How much of you could he be expected to stand?” Raining said, but she pulled Wire close and hugged her. Raining had never been cuddlesome; even as a baby she had squirmed away from doting grown-ups. Wire, who was incurably given to spontaneous hugging, backslapping, hand-taking, shoulder-grabbing, and hair-tousling, knew Raining’s flinch better than anyone. But Raining was not drawing away now. In the dripping darkness she hugged Wire fiercely and would not let her go. Wire was glad of her, and the warmth of her.

  “You’re shivering,” Raining said, stepping back at last. “Let’s take you home and get a nice hot cup of tea in you.”

  Wire shone the flashlight around, still tightly gripping Raining’s hand. “Are you sure you can find your way back?”

  Raining laughed. “It’s my forest,” she said.

  On the morning the Forest had awakened and spilled across much of Greater Vancouver, Raining’s great-grandmother, Jackie Chiu, had been a student at the University of British Columbia. Seeing that the road out from campus had been overwhelmed by trees, she had abandoned her car and plunged into the newly conscious wood on foot. All the works of man had been consumed within. Roads had been swallowed, old trails obliterated. Telephone poles thrust out branches and burst into leaf. Vines and creepers wound around houses and pulled them down, doing in hours the work of a hundred years.

  Three days later, scratched and gaunt and bitten, Jackie Chiu had emerged delirious at the edge of False Creek, passing by the ruins of the Science Museum and wandering onto the Skytrain platform that marked the edge of the wood. Afterward she said, “You keep walking for what you love.” In the seventy years that had passed since, she was still the only person to have passed all the way through the Forest alive, and human.

  Her love bit into the wood like a nail driven into an oak. The Forest grew around her as it awoke, and she in turn lost a part of herself beneath the trees. The Forest let one house only remain inside its borders. This
it gave to Jackie Chiu, and it was here she brought her family. Her daughter, Mouse, and granddaughter, Bell, and great-granddaughter, Raining, were raised inside the wood, and did service to it; and the wood watched over them in turn.

  So it really was Raining’s forest, in a way. As if to prove it, the path which had led Wire aimlessly through the wood for a whole day before abandoning her appeared under Raining’s feet. They set out. Within a few steps they could see the lights flickering in the windows of Cedar House, and moments later they were opening the back door, tracking in mud and a smell of moldering pine needles.

  Wire jumped at the threshold and gave a little yelp as a bird flapped right by her ear. It was the woodpecker. In the light that spilled from the kitchen she could see him beating into the night. She wondered again why he was following her; and wondered, too, what it would be like to sleep with a god.

  “Wire’s here!” shouted Lark, Raining’s three year-old daughter. She bounced off the couch and ran across the room, ponytail flying. Wire couldn’t help smiling back into her grinning upturned face.

  Wire took off her felted cloak and hung it on a peg in the entry hall next to Raining’s. Lark bounced solemnly in place. “You’re all wet.”

  Wire rubbed her mouth, testing the puffy edges of her split lip. “I’m aware of that.”

  Raining’s mother, Bell, came down the stairs and into the parlor room. Bell had been born when the Forest’s power was greatest, and she carried its mark more deeply than her daughter. She reminded Wire of a birch tree. She was even thinner than Raining, and much taller. Her skin was a pale, almost silvery white, and her black hair was shot with highlights of forest green. Despite her odd appearance, there was nobody more warmly human than Bell, and Wire had often wished she and Raining could have swapped moms. “Wire! Hello, dear. You look like you could use a hot bath and a cup of tea after.”