Spiritwalk

by Charles de Lint

  “While each moment we stay here, our danger increases,” Ohn added.

  Sara nodded. She knew that much about the Otherworld. To those unprepared for the potency of its mysteries, the Otherworld was less a place of marvels than a source for madness. It wasn’t simply the imagination of storytellers that was the source for all those tales of mortals straying into Faerie coming back as either poets or mad.

  “Like the boar that attacked me?” she asked. “Or those memegwesi that Tim and I saw in the garden?”

  “The bodachs,” Esmeralda said. “They themselves won’t do us any harm unless we begin to believe their illusions. But the boar...” She rubbed wearily at her eyes. “We’re like a disease, insofar as the Otherworld is concerned. Continuing with that analogy, the boar is an antibody, trying to expel us from the Otherworld’s body. The longer we stay here, the more potent its defense will become until we’re finally gone.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if there were just a few of us—but we’ve the House itself and close to forty people, most of whom aren’t in the least bit prepared for what they’re undergoing....”

  “We were here before,” Sara said. “The House and a bunch of people.”

  “But you had a protector in the House then,” Ohn said. “This time we’re on our own.”

  “If we could find Jamie,” Esmeralda began.

  “I’ve got something!” Ginny called.

  They crowded around the computer to see images of the Weirdin symbols flickering rapidly across the screen. Sara tried to pick them out, but they were going by too fast for her to focus on any single one of them.

  “It’s like that story about the I Ching,” Esmeralda said, speaking more to herself.

  “What’s that?” Sara asked.

  “Someone was supposed to have asked the book to define itself. In response, it gave back six moving lines when the yarrow stalks were thrown.”

  “Which means?” Ginny asked, a half breath before Sara spoke.

  “If you follow the moving lines through in their proper progression,” Esmeralda explained, “it gives you all sixty-four hexagrams—the entire I Ching. That’s what we’re seeing here. All of the Weirdin, every disc.”

  “But—”

  “Shhh. Let me concentrate.”

  Esmeralda closed her eyes. The light from the screen flickered on her face, waking strange shadows that were here, gone again, there. Sara could feel something like a static charge building up in the room. A breeze seemed to have spring up, although there was no window open.

  “Got... something...” Esmeralda said.

  “Take care,” Ohn told her, but Sara could tell that Esmeralda hadn’t heard him.

  Esmeralda turned from the screen and took two steps into the center of the room.

  “It’s closer,” she said. “I’ve almost...”

  The breeze turned into a sudden wind, spinning paper from the desk and tossing Esmeralda’s long hair about her shoulders. She took another step and then it was as though she’d stepped behind an invisible wall. There was a slight sound of air being displaced, then the wind was gone.

  And so was Esmeralda.

  Ginny stared open-mouthed at where Esmeralda had vanished. Sara was almost as surprised, for all that she was used to the abrupt magical appearances and disappearances of Pukwudji and his kin. Only Ohn seemed calm.

  “Goath an lar, “ he murmured.

  Sara automatically translated the Gaelic words into English. The first time she’d met Tal he’d given her the gift of tongues. Westlin Wind, Ohn had named Esmeralda. Now she understood that mercurial feyness that she had always sensed around Esmeralda. She was like the little mysteries of the Otherworld, an air spirit with the secret of the wind hidden in her breast.

  “I fear for her,” Ohn added.

  With a vague sense of surprise, Sara knew that she did too. Somewhere between the argument they’d had when they’d parted a year ago and this moment, she realized that while perhaps she didn’t exactly like this woman who’d assumed all of the responsibilities that Sara should have herself, she did admire Esmeralda.

  “Does she know her way around?” Sara asked, thinking of how easily she’d lost herself in getting here.

  Ohn nodded. “I believe that she is as at home in the Otherworlds as she is in her own, but I doubt that all the knowledge in either will be enough.”

  “Why? What do you know?”

  Ohn turned to look at her. “Esmeralda is like your Jamie was: she collects knowledge and lore and seeks to understand the worlds better through both. Her strength is in how she can open roads for others—both physical roads, and pathways of the mind and spirit. She has no power of her own.”

  “You call vanishing like she did having no power?” Ginny asked.

  It was obvious from the tone of her voice that she was still having trouble assimilating what she’d just seen.

  “There are two kinds of magic,” Ohn said. “One involves personal abilities, such as how Esmeralda can step between the worlds and her gift of vision which allows her to see beyond the physical to the heart of a matter so that she knows its essence. The other is more complex as it involves the actual manipulation of matter, the ability to impose one’s will upon an object or another being and transform it.

  “I sense the hand of an adept skilled in the latter art involved in all of this.”

  Sara and Ginny were still mulling that over when Emma came bursting in through the study door.

  “Where’s Esmeralda?” she asked. “I’ve got to talk to her. I know what’s going on.”

  Wonderful, Sara thought. Why couldn’t Emma have shown up five minutes earlier?

  “Your timing’s the pits,” she said.

  The Oldest War

  The Gray Man—autumn, west,

  twilight, mystery, elf-friend

  —Weirdin disc; Prime, 2.a

  Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast, or a god.

  —Aristotle, from Politics

  1

  She knew, Cal thought every time Julianne looked at him. She knew exactly what had happened to him.

  He could tell that she wanted to talk to him about it, but that was something he just couldn’t handle. Every time he thought about how he’d been treating her, his shame rose like a tidal wave inside him, making it impossible to breathe. It was as though she’d caught him masturbating with a picture of her in his free hand, which, in a way, was exactly what he had been doing. Not physically, perhaps, but it really didn’t make much difference, did it? He’d still been doing it.

  How was he ever supposed to face her again?

  If they ever got out of this weird forest, the first thing he was going to do was pack up and move his things out of the House. Maybe he’d even move out of the city.

  “You okay?”

  He started at Tim’s voice, then realized that he’d been standing at a cupboard, staring at the ranks of canned soups, pad in one hand, pencil immobile in the other. He was supposed to be taking inventory with Tim and the two Irish students, but he hadn’t written a thing down in five minutes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just dandy.”

  Before Tim could continue the conversation, Cal got busy tallying cans of soup. He gave a sigh of relief as Tim turned away and went back to his own counting, but it wasn’t long before his concentration drifted again.

  Man, he thought. For a gourmet cook, Brach sure stocked a full larder of canned goods. He could understand the dry goods—flour, teas and coffees, spices—but he’d always thought that real hotshot chefs preferred fresh vegetables, pasta and the like to the canned and packaged varieties. You’d think-

  A thump on the door close to where he was standing brought him back to his surroundings once more.

  “What-?” he began.

  A heavy grunting on the far side of the door—followed by a second, louder thump that made the wooden panels shudder—cut him off. Tim rose up from the floor cupboard he’d been investigating. The Irish s
tudents stepped out of the pantry.

  The Penwith Kitchen, like the Silkwater on the far side of the House, looked out onto the garden, which was completely enclosed by the House. There shouldn’t be anybody out there, Cal thought as the door took another blow. This time one of the panels cracked. The grunting was louder—angry. A fourth blow knocked out the cracked panel and then they could all see the snout of the wild boar that was attempting to break in.

  “Jesus!” Tim said.

  Seeing them, the boar went into a frenzy, battering the door, hooves scrabbling on the porch outside. Tim gave one of the students a push down the hall that led deeper into the House.

  “Get out of here!” he cried. “C’mon—move”

  The other student hurried to follow. Tim tugged on Cal’s arm, but Cal hardly felt the touch. He was transfixed by the boar’s fury as it fought to widen the hole it had broken in the door. The creature’s enraged gaze settled on him.

  That should have been Julianne’s reaction, he thought. She should have been angry with him, she should have hated him for the lie he’d held between them. Instead, she’d forgiven him. He’d seen it in her eyes.

  How the hell could anybody be that compassionate?

  Maybe he should just let the boar-

  “Have you got a death wish or something, Townsend?” Tim asked.

  His grip tightened on Cal’s arm. Without giving Cal the chance to protest, he hauled him out of the kitchen and slammed the door shut.

  “Shit,” Tim said. “If it can get through that outside door, this isn’t going to hold it back at all.”

  Cal finally focused on his companions. He shivered as he realized what he’d been thinking. Letting the boar attack him—that was just being crazy.

  “We’ve got to warn the others,” one of the students said.

  Tim nodded. “And get Blue to haul out some of his artillery.”

  They could still hear the boar worrying at the door. There was the sound of tearing wood, a heavy snorting, bangs as it threw its immense body against the breaking wood.

  “Let’s go!” Tim cried.

  He started off down the hall at a run. The students followed. Cal hesitated for a long moment. He listened to the boar’s fury and tried to understand what had gotten into him back there in the kitchen. Then he heard the door leading into the garden give way and he bolted after the others. Vaguely he heard a sharp report from the other side of the House—like the backfire of a car, or a gun being fired—but he was in too much of a hurry to give it more than a passing thought.

  Blue had already broken out the artillery. He kept his old Winchester and a 12-gauge pump-action Remington shotgun for himself, passing along another pair of shotguns, a Marlin lever-action .22 and a Browning single-shot rifle to those who were taking the first patrol through the House’s corridors.

  Ohn had been teamed with a sculptor named Sean Byrne—a huge, strapping man with features as roughly chiseled as his art was in its initial stages. He carried one of Blue’s shotguns cradled in his arms as the two of them patrolled the long hallway that ran along the north side of the house. Ohn had refused Blue’s offer of a weapon himself, holding up the claw of his hand when Blue tried to argue with him.

  “Christ,” Blue had said, “I wasn’t thinking....”

  Ohn had simply laid his good hand on Blue’s shoulder, giving him a squeeze before he followed Sean out on their patrol.

  “Some weird scene,” Sean said as they reached the door to the Library and were about to start back.

  Ohn nodded. He paused to look at the jungle of vegetation that had overtaken Ginny’s workplace. There were rustlings in the undergrowth that lay thick against the bookshelves, twitterings and small rappings against the glass display shelves.

  “Makes you wonder,” Sean went on.

  Ohn wondered constantly, about so much that it couldn’t possibly all be catalogued. But that was what the Mysteries did: they made one question and wonder. Ohn didn’t believe that they existed for that purpose; the Mysteries simply were. If anything, perhaps man had been created to question them and wonder.

  “And where does your wondering take you?” he asked his companion.

  Sean shrugged. He shifted the shotgun from the crook of his arm so that its barrels lay against his shoulder.

  “Well,” he said. “You hear about things like this all the time—UFO abductions, Bigfoot, all that weird stuff—and you have to just laugh at it. You see those hokey faked-up pictures they run in the supermarket tabloids.... That’s what’d happen if we went to anyone with this story. It would sound just as phony. Except it’s real.”

  Ohn’s gaze drifted back to the wild thickets that had taken over the Library.

  “Indeed,” he said.

  “So it makes me wonder,” Sean said. “How much of that stuff I used to laugh at—how much of it was real?”

  “One marvel does not necessarily beget another,” Ohn replied. “I don’t doubt that some of what you speak of was real, but logic dictates that it can’t all be so.”

  “You can say that, even looking at all of this?” Sean asked, waving a hand at the Library. “Even being where we are?”

  “Perhaps especially so,” Ohn replied. “There is a great world of difference between Mystery and nonsense, between glamour and fantasy. What we are experiencing will remain with us forever—that is part of its gift to us. It changes us.” He tapped his chest. “Here, within—where it matters.

  “Those others—the ones that are written up in the broad-sheets of which you spoke—their lives don’t seem changed to me. The only difference it has made in their lives is that it brought them some momentary fame; their neighbors regard them with either sympathy or mockery, but they learned nothing from their experiences. They weren’t changed.” He turned to look at his companion. “How can anyone experience this and not be changed—irrevocably so?”

  “People react differently to things,” Sean said. “Just because they don’t seem changed doesn’t mean that what they saw or felt wasn’t real.”

  “Granted,” Ohn said. “But in my experience, it’s best to simply keep an open mind and—”

  He broke off at the sudden clatter of hoofbeats that came from the hallway that ran along the south side of the House. Both men stepped from the doorway of the Library. As Sean brought the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder, a stag came around the corner of the hall into their view. Its hooves slid on the floor, digging long runnels into the hardwood’s finish; then it bounded toward them.

  It was a beautiful beast, Ohn thought, with at least twelve tines per antler. A majestic stag, loosed from the wood to find itself lost in the House like a stray thought.

  He started to draw back into the Library, out of the creature’s way, when he realized that Sean was about to fire.

  “No!” he cried, pushing the barrel of the gun up into the air just as Sean pulled the trigger.

  The roar of the shotgun was deafening. Off-balanced as Sean was, the kick of the weapon tumbled him to the floor. The stag tried to stop, legs scrabbling, hooves sliding, dignity stolen as it sought purchase on the smooth floor. It bumped against the wall, its antlers striking the doorframe not three inches from Ohn’s head.

  Ohn ducked as the wood splintered. His own sense of balance was all awry from the ringing in his ears. He leaned against the doorframe, watching as the stag slid to a stop a few yards farther down the hall. It turned panicked eyes in his direction for one long moment; then it fled off down the hall.

  “Jesus,” Sean said, picking himself up from the floor. “What’d you do that for? It could’ve killed us.”

  “It wasn’t trying to hurt us,” Ohn said. “It was just scared.”

  “Scared. Right. What the hell was it doing in here?”

  “It didn’t want to be here any more than we do,” Ohn replied. “It’s the forest—it’s growing stronger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain. I just know that the long
er we stay here, intruding on the forest, the more perilous it will become for us.” He turned to Sean. “We don’t belong here, you see—not the House, not so many of us, all at once. Our presence here angers the forest and its anger is transmitted to the creatures that inhabit its reaches, spreading panic and fear and anger among them.

  “They don’t mean to hurt us, but they will.”

  “We’d better get back and tell the others,” Sean said.

  Ohn nodded. “Though I don’t doubt that they are already aware.”

  His gaze returned to the jungle that the Library now held. He thought of Jamie’s spirit lost and of Esmeralda gone in search of it. His fear for her safety—a fear which had lain heavy in his thoughts since the moment she’d vanished from the Postman’s Room—grew into a sharp blade of pain.

  She will survive, he told himself. She had to.

  He gave the interior of the Library a last look, then hurried after Sean.

  Judy didn’t like guns but considering their present situation, not having one seemed a worse proposition than carrying one, so she found herself hauling around one of Blue’s rifles. Knowing her luck, she’d probably shoot herself in the foot with it.

  “It’s just a twenty-two, so it doesn’t have too much of a kick,” he assured her. “But it doesn’t have that much stopping power either, so don’t go getting cocky.”

  “I’ll leave that for you he-man types,” she told him.

  Blue had seemed surprised at how few of those trapped with them in the Otherworld had any experience with weapons. There was a guy named Willie McLoughlin who was one of the Pagan Party, the sculptor Sean and—this surprised Judy the most—one of the poets, John Haven, reed-thin and the softest-spoken of the bunch of them. She figured Julianne could probably handle one too, what with having a handful of brothers and the way she knew her way around the dirt bikes, but Julianne never spoke up.

  “When I was a kid, everybody had a BB gun,” Blue had said, “and you just waited for the day you got your first twenty-two.”

  “The closest I ever got was a GI Joe doll,” Judy told him. “I got him for the accessories—you know, the jeep and stuff.”