Spiritwalk

by Charles de Lint

  Sobbing for breath, she began to haul herself to her feet, but then they were there, a circle of them standing all around her.

  Not one of them appeared out of breath.

  They were squat ugly creatures, body hair covering their lower torso and legs like wiry trousers, their upper bodies hairless and pale. Wide noses split their flat faces. The heads were triangular, reptilian almost. Thick dirty-white hair like a Rastaman’s dread-locks hung to their broad shoulders. Their eyes were a deep green and, in the moonlight, gleamed like the reflective retinas of a cat.

  She turned slowly, panting for air, taking in their watching stance, the grins that split thick lips, the utter silence with which they encircled her. They cast shadows, thick and crouching on the grass. Something in their eyes, in the alien set of their features, told her that the chase, by and of itself, held a certain pleasure for them.

  “P-please...” she tried, but knew before she spoke that whatever she said would mean nothing to them. “I don’t... I never... don’t...”

  Had they been willing to listen, she wouldn’t have known what to say. Her mind was empty, filled only with emotion. Fear. Raw, paralyzing fear.

  The circle opened then and another of the creatures walked slowly toward her. There were bones woven into his hair—small bones like those of a bird, or a rodent, or a man’s fingers. His phallus stood erect between his legs, its tip shiny. The lust in his eyes was not a carnal lust for her body, but a lust for the hunt. She was the game, those eyes told her, and she had quit the chase too soon.

  “Run!” he told her, the word issuing like a grunt.

  “P-please...” she tried again.

  He carried a short staff, bedecked with bones and shells and feathers tied to it by leather thongs. He raised it and she cringed, waiting for the blow, but then there was a new sound in the night. A distant throbbing like thunder. He hesitated, staff still lifted. His nostrils flared as he turned his head toward the source of the sound.

  Light blossomed at the top of the hill, the thunder resolving into the roar of an engine. When the machine topped the rise, it appeared to be bathed in a halo of light. The leader of the creatures grunted—they were words, but they were unintelligible to her. Like ghosts, for all their bulk, the creatures melted into the night.

  The leader was last to go. He touched her knee with the tip of his staff and pain fired there, lancing up her thigh. Then he, too, was gone.

  She collapsed forward, crouching on her hands and knees in the damp grass, rough sobs heaving up her throat. That was the position in which the headbeam of the chopped-down 1958 Harley-Davidson caught her. The big motor whined down as its rider brought the machine to a halt. He shut off the engine, but the headbeam stayed on, as he had it wired to the bike’s accessory terminal. With just a six-volt battery powering it, he had about fifteen minutes of light. Kicking out the stand, he rested the Harley’s weight on it.

  “Hey.”

  The voice was gentle, but she didn’t look up. The rider took off his black helmet and laid it on the seat of the Harley, then stepped cautiously toward her, approaching her as though she were a wild animal that would flee at the slightest provocation. His gaze darted left and right, looking for whatever had left her in this condition, but the night was quiet. The only sound was the creak of his boots as he knelt down by her, close, but not close enough to frighten her.

  “Hey,” he said again. “How bad are you hurting?”

  This time she looked up. She saw a broad-shouldered man, the eagle of a Harley T-shirt stretched tight against a weight lifter’s build. His jeans were greasy, his boots black. His face was roughly sculptured, as though an artist had roughed it out in clay but never gone back to finish it. Long black hair was drawn back in a ponytail. He cast a shadow that stretched out long in front of him, almost touching her.

  “P-please...” she mumbled as though it were the only word she knew. Where was her name? Where was her past?

  She knew enough to know that she should have one, but while she could remember a thousand details about the world, anything personal was simply a blank.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore,” the man said.

  He reached a hand out to her and she cringed back. The tightly closed fist opened convulsively and a small round white disc fell on the grass between them. Moving slowly, he picked it up and held it up to the light thrown by the Harley’s headbeam.

  “Shit,” he said, looking at that bone disc. His gaze returned to her. “Where did you get this?”

  Fear filled her eyes. “I... I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you. What’s your name?”

  Tears brimmed. “I don’t know.”

  He studied her for a long moment. She was pretty in a way he couldn’t define—not any one thing on its own, but everything together. There was a tanned glow to her skin. Her hair was a chestnut red and tied back in a French braid. She wore jeans and a white blouse with a frill around the neckline. Adidas on her feet. No purse. The big green-gray eyes, wet with tears, regarded him, still afraid.

  “I know I don’t look like much,” he said, “but I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that I won’t hurt you. Tell me where you want to go and I’ll take you there, okay?”

  “I don’t... I don’t have anyplace....” The words were barely a whisper.

  “You’re scared, right?”

  Numbly, she nodded.

  “Do you want to try to trust me?”

  A weak shrug.

  “You can’t stay here on your own.”

  “But I... I...”

  This time he moved forward, and as the flood of tears broke, he held her against his shoulder. At first she went stiff and pushed weakly at him, but he was too strong. Then she went limp in his arms.

  “Everything’s going to work out,” he said. “It usually does—though it doesn’t seem like it at the time.” He spoke soothingly, as though to a wounded animal. “My name’s Blue—funny name for a guy, right? But you should hear what my old lady saddled me with....”

  2

  In the bedroom of her small chalet in Old Chelsea, Emma Fenn woke suddenly to lie staring up at the pooling shadows of her bedroom ceiling. The three-room building creaked to itself. Outside, choruses of crickets and frogs vied with each other. In the combination living room/kitchen, the metal hands of the old mantel clock above the fireplace were edging toward midnight.

  Emma had owned the chalet for a short enough time to still wake each morning with a warm sense of ownership. She had a mortgage, true enough, but the building and its acre and a half of land were still hers. The sense of proprietorship made up for the half-hour drive to and from the city where she worked five days a week.

  But it was almost midnight now, not morning, and what filled her as she lay staring up at her ceiling was only an emptiness and nothing more. She sat up, tugging a pillow up behind her. Half-asleep, she became more and more awake as she explored her feelings—or rather her lack of them.

  While she never considered herself emotionally unstable, she was still aware of her easy susceptibility to sudden mood swings. She was either bubbling with happiness, or vivid with anger, or mind-numbingly bored, or hopelessly sadbut never this. Never just... empty. It wasn’t the bleakness of a depression, either. There was simply nothing there.

  Why am I doing this to myself? she wondered. Of course I’ve still got feelings. It’s not like someone came along while I was sleeping and just stole them all away....

  Some vague memory stirred at that ridiculous thought. She had the oddest feeling that something strange had happened to her this evening, but she couldn’t pinpoint it for the life of her. Getting up from the bed, she padded barefoot out through the living room to the bathroom. There she flicked on the light and blinked at its glare. Once her eyes had adjusted to it, she leaned forward to look at herself in the mirror.

  Her familiar features leaned toward her in the mirror. Nothing different there.

>   She sat down on the toilet, jumping with a start when something touched her bare calves. It was only her cat, Beng. Lean and black, Beng was a gangly eight-month-old stray that had appeared one morning on her doorstep not long after she moved in, and never left. According to a book she was reading at the time, “Beng” was a Romany word for the devil, and since the cat looked as though he had more than a bit of the devil in him, she decided that the name fit him to a T.

  “Do you think it’s time for breakfast?” she asked as she hoisted him onto her lap.

  Beng purred noisily, pushing his head agaisnt her arm while kneading her lap. Emma got no pleasure from the cat’s familiar ministrations. After a few moments, she put him down on the floor again and drifted into the living room. Past twelve. She opened her front door and stared through the screen at the night.

  What’s wrong with me? she thought. Why do I feel as though someone’s snuck in and stole away a part of me?

  She called up some memories. Office politics—Gina playing her against their superivisor—but while she could perceive that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do, she couldn’t muster any anger at Gina tonight. All right. Jimmy dropping her for that anorexic model bimbo of his. That hurt was only three weeks old. But while she could remember the pain of the moment, and her subsequent anger, right now she didn’t feel anything.

  This was starting to get scary, she thought, except those emotions, too, were more something she realized she should be feeling than what she actually was.

  Beng wrapped himself around her legs until she bent down and cradled him in her arms. Closing the door, she retraced her way to the bathroom, shut off the light, and went back to bed. She lay there in the dark, sensing the house around her, the night beyond its walls, Beng curled up and purring on her stomach, but still couldn’t call up one genuine feeling that wasn’t a secondhand memory.

  The cat, had he been able to speak, might have mentioned one more oddity to her. When she was in the bathroom with the light on, she had cast no shadow. But whatever languages Beng knew, there weren’t any that he shared with his mistress.

  3

  Blue held her until the flood of tears subsided into sniffles. The headbeam on his Harley had gotten a little dimmer. To save his battery, he left her for a moment to shut it off, then came back and sat near her, keeping his distance now so that she wouldn’t feel threatened.

  “The way I see it,” he said, “is we’ve got two choices. Either we camp out here for the night, or I take you somewhere.”

  The moonlight was bright enough for him to see her stiffen, even if he couldn’t make out her features.

  “I... I told you...” she began haltingly.

  “Okay,” he said quickly. “No problem—or at least nothing we can’t handle. I know a place in town where you can stay long as you want. Are you game?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “We’re going to have to find a name for you. I can’t just go around calling you ’hey you.’ “

  “I’d like one like yours—a color.”

  “Sure. Black and Blue—wouldn’t we make a pair?”

  “But I can’t think of a name. I...”

  “Don’t force it,” Blue said. He looked down at the button-sized bone disc in his hand. “Maybe I’ll just call you Button.” His smile was lost in the dark.

  “B-button?”

  She was like a mouse, Blue thought, all trembling and scared and lost in the middle of a field. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? We can think up a better one later. But first we’ll find ourselves a more comfortable place to hang out in—what do you say?”

  “Okay.”

  “So let’s go.”

  He fitted her with his spare helmet, then pushed his own down over his thick hair. Warning her to hang on, he kicked the bike into life and headed down the parkway, the big engine throbbing under them.

  She held on, leaning close against him. He could feel her breasts through the thin material of his T-shirt, her arms tight around his waist. Her closeness woke memories he didn’t want to deal with, but he couldn’t help realizing how much he’d missed having someone to care about. Somone to cruise with and hang around with in the House. Someone who could maybe care for him....

  Pushing those feelings away, he concentrated on the bike, on the wind in his face and the asphalt unrolling underneath him, but it was hard to ignore her, hanging on to him as if he was her anchor in a world gone strange. No name. No identity. He could see how that’d screw you up. But sometimes, he thought, it could be a blessing. It all depended on what you’d been. Who you’d hurt, and how bad. And maybe how bad you were hurting yourself.

  They crossed a bridge in Hull, over the Ottawa River into downtown Ottawa. The hour was late and there was little traffic, so he just took Bank Street all the way down to the Glebe. At Patterson Avenue, he turned left, gunning the bike up the quiet street to O’Connor. There was a control button for a garage door on O’Connor, mounted on the Harley’s handlebars. Blue thumbed it as he turned onto O’Connor, and the door slid open. A moment later he was parking the bike alongside four others and killing the engine. The door closed automatically behind them, rolling smoothing on its rollers.

  “Well, here we are, Button,” Blue said. “End of the line.”

  His passenger got off and stood uncertainly beside the Harley. Blue removed his helmet, then helped Button with hers. In the light of the garage they got their first good look at each other. Button spotted the small gold earrings in each of Blue’s ears. She seemed less nervous now. Their gazes met and Blue saw that something in his eyes seemed to satisfy her that she was in safe hands.

  “I don’t know about calling you Button,” he said as he looked at her. “It’s not that you aren’t cute as a...” And then he noticed something else—she wasn’t casting a shadow. He kept the shock from his face as she spoke.

  “I like the name,” she told him. She swayed slightly and put a hand to the seat of the Harley to keep her balance.

  He couldn’t stop staring at the floor where his own shadow lay across the cement where hers should have been. Keep it cool, he told himself. But this was some weird shit.

  “Tired?” he asked, keeping his voice level.

  She nodded. “What is this place?”

  “Just the garage where I keep my bikes and tools. The place belongs to friends of mine and I’m just sort of looking after it...” The strangeness of finding her, of the bone disc and her lack of a shadow, dissolved under a flood of memory. He couldn’t stop the look of pain that crossed his features. “On a permanent basis, looks like. Come on. I’ll show you where you can crash.”

  He led her out of the garage into a long hallway that just seemed to go on forever.

  “It’s huge,” Button said.

  Blue nodded. “Takes up a whole block. It’s called Tamson House after... after the guy that owned it. But he’s been—”

  Button stumbled and Blue put an arm around her to help keep her on her feet. He was just as happy not going into why things were the way they were. He glanced back at his lone shadow following them up the hall, half surprised that there was any substance to her at all. He thought of the late-night movies he loved. Vampires didn’t cast a shadow—not in the old Hammer flicks anyway—but he told himself to can that shit. Besides, it was reflections in a mirror, not shadows. And you didn’t find vampires flaked out on the side of the Gatineau Parkway. You didn’t find vampires, period, except when he thought of some of the weird shit he had seen go down....

  With Button leaning heavily against him, he took her upstairs to one of the bedrooms and tucked her in, dressed as she was. All he took off were her running shoes. She was asleep before he drew the comforter up to her chin.

  Blue sighed as he looked down at her. He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew the small bone disc she’d been clutching when he’d found her. No shadow. No memories. Something was brewing, no doubt about that. He wondered if bringing her here had been such a good idea. He couldn’t have
just left her there, but after what happened the last time he saw one of these little bone discs...

  He sighed again. There was going to be shit to pay, no doubt about it. Trouble was, he didn’t know if he was up to it—not on his own.

  “But what’ve you got to lose this time?” he asked softly. The room swallowed the words and Button stirred in her sleep. What with one thing and another, he’d pretty well lost it all before.

  Shoving the disc back into his jeans, he left the room, closing the door softly behind him. A few doors down the hall, he turned in to what had been Jamie’s study—the room they’d called the Postman’s Room after the mailman who’d hung out there all through one long mail strike. Jamie’s computer sat on the desk, the green screen glowing like a cyclops’s eye in the dark room. A small green cursor pulsed in one corner. Jamie had called the computer Memoria, but Blue had another name for it.

  There were no messages on the screen as Blue sat down in front of it.

  4

  Button slept deeply, nesting in the flannel sheet and comforter like a cat. All around her, the vast building that was Tamson House stirred and creaked. At another time, the curious building, the strange bed, the unfamiliar noises might have kept her awake. But tonight they lulled her sleeping mind, allowing a crack in the wall that hid her memories from her to open ever so slightly.

  She remembered herself as a teenager and a meeting she had one day with another girl the same age as she was—sixteen going on forty. They bumped into each other as she was coming out of the Classics Bookshop in the National Arts Centre building and the other girl was coming in. Mumbled “excuse me’s” died in their throats as something sparked between their gazes.

  Button was an outgoing personality, but it was all surface. She hung around with the other kids at school, doing her best to fit in, though all the while a different set of values from dates and proms and boyfriends filled her head. She read Yeats and Dylan Thomas and K. M. Briggs, paying only lip service to whatever bands were currently popular with her peers. She read the classics and kept a journal instead of a diary. She drew whenever she could—fine-line pen-and-inks, sketches, watercolors, all in the Romantic tradition of Burne-Jones and William Morris. She held animistic beliefs and was positive that everything from the moon and seasons and winds to the trees and mountains and lakes had its own individual personality.