Yarrow

by Charles de Lint

  Where do you get your ideas?

  Well, you see…

  * * *

  Cat was eleven when she decided she wanted to be a writer. It was one of those nebulous decisions that children are prone to, and came hard on the heels of her umpteenth rereading of The Wind in the Willows. Her head was aswirl with the adventures of Ratty and Mole and the incorrigible Mr. Toad, when the realization came to her all in a flash. This was what she wanted to do.

  Her first attempts continued the adventures of Grahame's famous characters, but she soon enjoyed writing more about the new characters that she'd added to the Wild Wood's population than the ones that were rightly Kenneth Grahame's private domain. She filled a number of school notebooks with her own tales of Mouse and Sparrow, and still had a file folder full of those embarrassing efforts hidden away in a drawer somewhere.

  It wasn't until a month or so later, in early winter, when she was walking with Kothlen in the Otherworld, that she shared her ambition with another person. She tried to explain it to him as they ambled through the hills that lay between the great oak and apple wood which was the domain of antlered Mynfel and the gray seas where the selchies and merrows could be seen sporting in the waves most nights.

  Kothlen's father was Morer, the silver-haired harper of Gwyn ap Nudd's court, but his mother was a mortal, and it was from her that he got the blue in his blue-green eyes and the light-brown streaks in his own silvery hair. His features were not so sharp edged as the other elfin folk, and he always had time for the tangle-haired moppet who came night-visiting to his world. Next to Tiddy Mun, and for all the age difference between them, Kothlen was her best friend.

  Unlike his father, he was not a harper. But he was a bard all the same, and the stories that he knew…

  He listened to Cat prattle on with a smile on his lips, well pleased that she should choose to follow his own profession.

  "There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale," he remarked when Cat finally ran out of words.

  Cat nodded. Though she was only eleven, she was already a voracious reader.

  "I just know it's what I want to do," she said, "but…"

  Her voice trailed off, and for a time they walked in silence. The tang of the sea was in the air. The Otherworld stars wheeled and spun in constellations unfamiliar to Cat's home-world, but well known to her.

  "But what?" Kothlen prompted.

  "I don't know what to write about."

  "Sit with me a moment," he said.

  He led her to an outcrop of stone that pushed its granite surface out of the heather nearby. Kothlen made himself comfortable while Cat perched like one of her namesakes beside him. Her parents called her Katie, but she was already thinking of herself as Cat. And as a cat, an outsider, an observer more than a participant, just like the cats she always had around her. It was a romantic notion that made up for the fact that she was the one who alienated herself from her peers. It would be another year before Kothlen gave her her own secret name.

  "The tales I tell are old," he said. "When I relate them to you, I am merely retelling some ancient story or history in my own voice."

  "You don't make them up?"

  Kothlen laughed. "Oh, some of them. But mostly I just fill out the details. The tales themselves are what they always were. I think of them as the bones of some ancient beast that I must add flesh to so that it can live again. But while the tale itself, its truth, is of the utmost importance, it is the telling that allows it to be remembered or forgotten. The trueness of the telling is what makes up a storyteller's craft."

  "So I could just work with the stories that you tell me, couldn't I? At least for starters."

  "As long as you approach them with respect. The telling of tales is a most honorable profession, Cat. Remain true to the tale— never forget to give it its proper due, whatever you may add to it— and you will not go astray."

  Her first short story— ignoring her Wind in the Willows pastiches— took her the better part of six months to write. She worked at it with a determination that surprised her, listened carefully to Kothlen's criticisms, and discovered that there was far more to writing than simply setting the words on paper. When she had finished that first story— at 30,000 words it was more a novella— and she could sit with her notebooks on her lap and flip through all those pages filled with her neat handwriting, knowing it was her own hard work that had gone into its making, she felt a sense of accomplishment that would not be repeated until she made her first professional sale seven years later.

  Throughout her teen years she remained busy transcribing— at first Kothlen's stories, then Tiddy Mun's as well— scribbling in her notebooks, rewriting, appraising, considering, researching, trying to find her own "voice." She never considered sending the stories out in the beginning. In fact she never shared them at all, because she had no close friends she dared lend so much of her inner self.

  She switched from handwriting to a typewriter when she was seventeen, and after much heart-searching, submitted and sold a story the following year. It was "The Three Daughters of the Green Wizard," which appeared in the May '73 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was later reprinted in her first collection, Grindylow and Other Stories. The next year she sold three stories; in '75 she sold two.

  On New Year's Day of the following year she began her first novel, which took her a year and a half to complete. It was rejected fifteen times before it finally found a home in the back of her file drawer with the rest of her stories that hadn't quite worked out. By then she'd finished the final draft of The Sleeping Warrior, realized all the mistakes she'd made with the first novel and why it would never sell, sent out Warrior and received a contract for it in the mail three months later.

  During those years she finished high school and moved into her own apartment— a one-bedroom in Centretown at $150 a month. Working as a waitress, a CR-2 government clerk, a librarian, and in a bookstore, she wrote in the evenings initially until she'd saved up enough money and nerve to try her hand at writing full time.

  And all that while, she went night-visiting in the Otherworld, grew closer to Kothlen and Tiddy Mun and more withdrawn from the world she lived in during the day.

  Where do you get your ideas?

  Cat sighed. Gathering up The Moon in a Silver Cup manuscript, she put it in an oversize manila envelope and stowed it away in the bottom drawer of her desk under "things to get back to." Where did she get her ideas? Where did other writers get theirs?

  She was beginning to feel depressed again. There was nothing inside her that needed saying, nothing she wanted to share. She needed someone like Kothlen to bounce ideas off of. She needed Tiddy Mun to tell her one of his presposterous stories, like the one that had become "How Tod-Lowery Met the Moon."

  The light on her desk seemed too bright. She switched it off and sat in the darkness for a long time, not ready to face another night's dreamless sleep, but not quite prepared to stay up all night either. She wished she had someone to talk to, but found it hard to deal with people. At least on a personal level. Which was strange, for people seemed drawn to her; she was the one who drew back, who kept relationships at a certain distance. Like this afternoon. The only reason she'd managed to admit her block to Melissa was because it affected Melissa as well. If Melissa hadn't been her agent, Cat might never have told her.

  She thought of calling Melissa— not now, but tomorrow morning. Melissa would listen. She'd understand. She'd proved that this afternoon. They'd spent three hours over lunch, and it wasn't just because Melissa saw her commission floundering under the weight of Cat's writing block. It was because she cared.

  Cat stared around her shadowed study. She felt very small in the darkness. The silence of the house weighed on her. It was too big a place for one person and two cats. Except she needed the room for her books and records— both of which seemed to grow like weeds, they accumulated so quickly— and it fit her adolescent dreams of the sort of place she wa
nted to live in when she grew up.

  She'd seen herself living in a place like this, but not with anyone else. She didn't need anyone else, not when she had her ghosts and her night-visiting. But now here she was, grown-up but lonely because her ghosts were gone and the house was empty. Just like her dreams. Even the cats, Ginger and Pad, were out for the night.

  Other people admitted to invisible or imagined childhood companions, only they all seemed to outgrow them. Was that what had happened to her now? Had she mysteriously become too mature for her shadow friends? But if that was true, why did she feel so damned empty inside? Was she supposed to replace the ghosts with real people? That must be what others did. Only where would she find a man like Kothlen outside of the Otherworld? Another Tiddy Mun? A Mynfel?

  * * *

  Rick Kirby stood with his back to Stella, looking out her living room window while he tried to contain his anger. Nit, nit, nit. Christ, that was all she did these days. They'd been arguing for three hours straight now. Around and around. The same old push and nit and pry. About the only thing that would stop her was to sew her fucking mouth shut.

  Stella's apartment was on the seventh of ten floors in Le Marquis, on the corner of Main and Lees, facing west. It had an underground garage, with a laundry room and storage area in the basement. The ground floor was taken up by Betty Brite Cleaners, She of Piccadilly Hairdressers, Le Marquis Confectionery and Groceries— where you could pick up every lottery ticket from the Provincial straight through to Cash-for-Life. The remainder of the ground floor consisted of offices and the superintendent's apartment. Across the street was the École de Mazenod, founded in 1933, and the Canadian Martyrs Church. Beyond them was Algonquin College and the Rideau Canal. Rick stared at them, unseeing. At this moment his own reflection interested him more than the view.

  Thirty-seven years old, but he didn't look a day over thirty. He was a good-looking dude, no doubt about it, and if Stella had any smarts she'd realize that there were one hell of a lot of women who'd be grateful to have just a third of the time he spent with her. Not that she wasn't a class act herself. But she was just too caught up in this whole outdated melodrama of one man/one woman, live within your means, don't take chances. Fuck it. You had to live, didn't you? You had to get a little high, get a little on the side, have yourself some fun. If it wasn't for the fact that she was holding papers on two thirds of Captain Computer, he'd have told her off a long time ago.

  She talked a lot about love and trust, but where did she come off having a lawyer draw up a contract between them before she lent him the fucking money in the first place? She just wanted a hold on him, that was all. Couldn't drag him to the altar, so she got herself another piece of legal bullshit to tie him down. Well, he was seeing Bill on Wednesday, and if he could swing himself a little deal with good old Bill, he'd be able to hand Stella back her money and say, Here's where you get off baby. Either you live with me the way I am or you can fuck off.

  The only hitch was, Bill just might not spring for the bucks. He'd have to wine and dine Bill, maybe take along Bill's sweet little secretary, who Rick knew had the hots for him, and see how things worked out. Until then it was sunshine and light time, that was all.

  "Look," he said, turning from the window.

  Stella sat on the couch, an unreadable expression in her eyes. Rick crossed the room and sat down beside her.

  "I'm sorry," he said, using just enough of his salesman's sincerity to make his repentance appear credible. "I get a little, you know, out of hand sometimes. I know it. Must be in my genes or something. But you come first. Any time you catch me acting like an asshole, you just tell me, because the one thing I don't want to blow is what we've got going between us."

  "Do you mean that, Rick? Do you really mean that?"

  He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. "Straight A's, babe, and no turning back."

  Stella leaned her head against his shoulder. If she could just believe him. But she was so confused with the way their relationship was going that she didn't even know what she wanted to believe anymore.

  Rick murmured in her ear. As he felt the tension ease from her, a clear moment of genuine affection for her came over him that had nothing to do with what she could do for him or how she looked on his arm when they went stepping out. It was like when they'd first met at Jim Blair's party. Real. Honest. A reaching out of compatibilities. Then he started thinking about how, once he got the new loan, there might be some way he could turn her fucking lawyer's contract back on itself and just keep it all— her money and Bill's.

  Cat got up from her desk and crossed the study to her thinking chair by the window. She curled up in it and stared up Willard Street. The people out there were real. She passed them every day, nodded hello to some, paused to exchange meaningless pleasantries with a few others. They'd all managed to become real, so why couldn't she? Why couldn't she shrug off the last vestiges of childhood, her shadow companions, and be like them?

  Something moved out on the street and she leaned forward, trying to make out what it was. A figure. Another lost soul out looking for old ghosts? Should she run out and tell whomever it was that she'd lost them too? Maybe they could go looking for them together.

  The figure on the street kept to the shadows, as though not wanting to be seen. Maybe it wasn't a neighbor out for a late evening stroll, Cat realized. There'd been a few break-ins in the area recently. Mrs. Beatty up on Bell wood had stopped her the day before yesterday and earnestly warned her to make sure every door and window was locked when she went out because "you just can't know anymore." The Thompsons on Belmont had been broken into last month, and Mrs. Beatty herself had lost a comforter that she'd left out on the line to dry overnight.

  "I know the insurance will cover it," she'd confided to Cat, "but that doesn't stop you from feeling… violated."

  With that in mind Cat felt a mild thrill of fear run up her spine when the figure stepped into the shadows of the redbrick house on the corner and simply stood there. Doing what? Her pulse quickened. He was watching her house. He was watching her!

  She pushed herself back into her chair, keeping as far back from the window as she could while still being able to look out of it. Had he seen her? It had to be a he. A woman wouldn't go around staring at people's houses in the middle of the night, would she? Sexism, perhaps, but Cat was sure it was a man down there, watching her. Why? Would he stop at that? Or was he waiting to see if the place was empty or she was asleep?

  She didn't know what to do. If it was a thief, the best plan would be to just walk around and turn on a few lights. But what if he wasn't a thief? What if he was something worse? What if he wanted her? Would turning on the lights draw him like a moth to flame? Did he have a scalpel hidden in a pocket? A butcher's knife?

  She knew she was getting carried away, but couldn't stop herself. She thought of going downstairs to phone the police, but that would take him out of her sight and she couldn't face not knowing exactly where he was. Right now he simply stood there, watching. What if, when she went downstairs, he started across the street and broke into the house while she was still on the phone, or only just dialing? The police would never get there in time to stop him. She didn't even want to think about what they'd be stopping him from.

  Throat dry, she seemed to sense another presence in the house already. She could still see the man, a slender dark shape in the shadows. Waiting. There wasn't anybody in her house, she knew. It was just the awful weight of his watching. You could always sense eyes upon you, the pressure of concentrated attention that could turn your head on a busy street. That was what she felt now. And, she realized, she'd felt this same presence before. Had the watcher taken up his post on other nights? Was he just trying to get up his nerve to—

  She broke off that chain of thought. She had to decide. Turn on the lights? Call the police? Sit here in the dark and do nothing at all?

  At that moment the pressure eased, the sense of impending doom rushing from her
like air escaping a balloon. She saw the watcher slip along the side of the house and vanish into the alleyway behind it. Letting out a breath she hadn't been aware of holding, she sat weakly in the chair. Her legs were so watery that she couldn't have stood if she'd wanted to.

  Now that the moment was over, she questioned her reaction to it. How much had been real and how much the workings of her own overactive imagination? God knows she was under a certain amount of stress as it was. For all she knew, what she'd taken for a prowler or worse— don't think about that!— could have been the fellow who lived in the house itself. Or someone who'd needed to relieve his bladder. How long had the whole incident taken anyway?

  No. She shook her head. Whomever it had been, he had been watching her house, watching her. She was sure of it. Wasn't she?

  Cat realized that about the only thing she was sure of was that she needed a friend. The pressure was beginning to tell on her. Her ghosts had left her alone for too long. She had to accept that she'd been deserted— by her friends in the Otherworld, or by her own imagination, or both— and if she didn't want to end up becoming some lunatic spinster locked away in a strange old house, she'd better do something about it. Now. Before it was too late.

  Coming this early had been a mistake. He should have satisfied his hunger first. But Lysistratus was driven to this place, to the skimming of the woman's dreams and the heady euphoria they produced in him. It was more than the simple pleasure he took from her.

  His gaze sought the window across the street and the woman behind it. She went to her sleep later each night, and tonight she had seen him. He wondered if it made a difference as he retreated from his vantage point and faded into the shadows.

  He went across the river to Hull, where the clubs stayed open until three, two hours later than those in Ottawa. He moved from club to club, letting the pulse of Europop rhythms and dancing crowds wash through him. A dark-haired woman took him home. She had the face of one of Botticelli's angels and the body of a harlot sheathed in a silk blouse and red spandex trousers. As he brought her to orgasm, he swallowed the quick spurt of pure psychic energy that exploded through her, then put her to sleep. Skimming her dreams, he trailed his fingers lightly across her flushed cheek, then left quietly.