Yarrow

by Charles de Lint

  Oh, man. I can do anything. And I'll be doing it forever.

  Mick was high, plain and simple. He held Becki loosely in his arms and drifted in a pleasant limbo that owed nothing to the reality that scratched away at the four walls that sheltered them. He had to have a leak, but couldn't summon the energy to get up from the bed. His headache was gone now. Everything was gone but the buzz.

  Dy-no-mite weed, he thought. Just what he'd needed.

  Turning his head slowly, he saw that all Becki was wearing was a T-shirt— one of his. He looked down at his own body. He wasn't even wearing that much. He remembered their lovemaking and smiled. He touched one of her nipples and felt it harden through the material of the shirt.

  "Mmm," she murmured, snuggling closer.

  "Love ya, babe," he said softly, brushing her forehead with his lips.

  The back door was a pain, but Rick managed to jimmy its lock without too much noise. Easing it open, he slipped through, making sure it locked again behind him. Got to lay it on them with the eyes, he reminded himself as he moved carefully through the darkened kitchen.

  He found the knife sitting on a breadboard and hefted it, enjoying the weight of it in his hand. He could feel the excitement build up inside him. It was like nothing he'd ever experienced before. He was so hard now he thought he'd drop his load right there in the kitchen.

  * * *

  Ben slammed the door to his apartment and ran for his cab. Tossing the baseball bat onto the front seat, he started the car with a roar. Tiddy Mun, who'd been approaching the vehicle nervously, lunged for the bushes beside Ben's apartment at the sound.

  "It's all right," Ben called to him. "It's just… just a wagon without a horse."

  Tiddy Mun sidled out of the bushes, saucer eyes wider than ever. A wagon? It was an iron dragon. He'd seen these monsters on the streets, swallowing and disgorging tallfolk, and feared their metal hides almost as much as he did the evil that stalked the Otherworld.

  When he'd crept to within a few feet of Ben's door, Ben reached down, and grabbing him under the arms, hauled him in. Tiddy Mun shuddered at the proximity of so much of the cold metal. His teeth chattered against each other. He perched on the seat, trying hard not to touch anything but its vinyl covers, eyes blinking furiously.

  Shoving the gearshift into first, Ben peeled away from the curb. Tiddy Mun moaned beside him.

  The door to the bedroom slammed open, shredding Mick's contentment as though a bear's paw had just raked across his chest. For a long moment of drug-induced stupor, he just stared at the intruder. The suit and short hair registered, the clean-shaven cheeks and the knife, the eyes…. The eyes were like the Dude's had been last night, icy and glittering. They pulled him down into their depths, turning everything inside him into jelly.

  He was dimly aware of Becki rising from the bed, of the intruder striking her. She staggered across the room and brought the stereo down when she landed against it. As she rose again, the intruder hit her with the hilt of the knife closed in his fist. Her head struck the side of the bed as she tumbled to the floor.

  Mick tried to get up, but the eyes held him immobile. He fought their influence, but now they were inches from his face, impossible to avoid, fish cold and penetrating. Mocking him. There was a weight on his chest. He remembered the knife, tried to call up the rage, the anger he needed to fight the spell of the intruder's eyes, but all that replied was a vast darkness without relief.

  * * *

  The tall and stately giants of Mynfel's wood reared all around Cat, hallowed in their green silence. She knew instinctively that this was where she'd left Toby yesterday afternoon. Before she had a chance to look for him, she heard something stir behind her.

  "Mistress Cat!" a now-familiar voice hailed her.

  "Hello, Toby." She turned and smiled to see his cocky grin. "Have you been waiting all this time?"

  "Indeed, indeed. I could only hope you'd return from wherever it was that you'd gone. How was your day?"

  "Fine. No, it was great. The first really good day I've had in a long time."

  "I'm happy for you," he said. "But happier to see you back. This is a strange wood, no mistaking it, and I've not felt quite… well, right the whole time I've been waiting."

  "This from a man who wants to find real magic?"

  "Ah, yes. Well, there is that. Shall we walk while we talk?"

  Cat stood quietly for a moment to get her bearings. She always knew the way to Redcap Hill; it tugged at her, as though an invisible thread bound them.

  "I've had a thought or two," Toby offered once they'd started walking. "About what you were telling me before you left. It was a curious tale, all things considered, and if I hadn't seen you vanish with my own two eyes, I might well have discounted the whole thing as I waited for you to get back. But be that as it may, once you did disappear— without so much as a puff of smoke— it put a whole new light on to an already incredible tale."

  "You didn't believe me?" Cat asked.

  "Now I didn't say that. I was merely stating that I had one or two reservations— very small reservations, mind you, but there they were all the same. I knew your being here couldn't be a dream, because that would make me nothing more than a figment of your imagination— a rather dismal prospect, you'll have to admit yourself. At least from my point of view. What I did consider was that this other world of yours might be a dream."

  He shot a glance at her to see how she was taking it all, but the poor light made it hard to gauge her reaction.

  "Of course," he added, "then you upped and vanished— clinching your story, as it were. So then I thought, with my back up against these old and magic trees and the better part of a day and the evening to think in, that you were in the unenviable position of trying to exist in two separate realities. I tried to imagine what it would be like, and decided it would be confusing."

  "It hasn't always been easy," Cat admitted. "I tend to concentrate on one world at a time, to the eventual harm of the other. It's hard to balance what I want to put into them. Sometimes I want more of one, sometimes more of the other."

  "I can see how that might happen. Have you ever tried to stay in just one?"

  "But I don't want to! They're both equally important to me."

  "Ah."

  "Besides, I don't think I could. I don't think it works that way. I don't even know how it does work. I've never really had any problem existing in both— nothing serious, that is— until whatever it is that's been stealing my dreams showed up. That weird man. He's the one that's spoiling it all."

  "When I think of him," Toby said, "I feel a cold chill run up my spine."

  "Me too. But I have to deal with him somehow. I just don't know where to begin."

  They walked in silence for a while, letting the peace of the forest settle the uneasiness that both of them felt when they thought of the dream thief.

  "Another curious thing," Toby said suddenly. "The horned lady whose wood this is— you said her name was Mynfel?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "I just find it odd, that's all. I would have thought she'd be named Derowen, for the oaks. Or even Avallen, for the apple trees in its glades."

  An unsettling premonition started up Cat's spine. "What… what does Mynfel mean?" she asked.

  Toby glanced at her. "Why, yarrow, of course. In the old tongue of the herbalists, that is."

  Cat stopped in her tracks. She could hear her heart thundering in her breast and thought there was an answering thrum that ran through the forest, earthy and root deep. She could see Kothlen standing before her, hear his voice so clearly he might be with her now, instead of lost in the years-old memory that had surfaced.

  "Everyone has a secret name," Kothlen told her then. "Every thing has one. It's the using of names that lends spells their strength. You must always guard yours, sharing it only with those you trust."

  "What's yours?" Cat asked. She was eleven then and full of the optimism of youth.

  Kothlen regarded her seriou
sly, then smiled. "Foxmoon," he said.

  Young she might have been, but she was old enough to understand what this moment meant. By giving her his secret name, Kothlen had sealed their friendship forever. Then she felt terrible.

  "I don't know mine!" she had wailed. "I want to tell you mine, but I can't."

  "Why yours is Yarrow," he said.

  "How… how do you know?"

  "Because I have given it to you just now. Someone must gift you with it, must see to the core of what you are and pluck that secret forth for you."

  "How do you know it's right?" she'd asked. But she already knew that it was because it fit her as though she'd been born to it.

  "I looked at you, looked in you, and it rose up from here"— Kothlen tapped his chest— "unbidden."

  She had looked up into his handsome alien face then, shy in that moment, when she hadn't been shy with him for years.

  "My name's Yarrow," she'd said so softly it was almost a whisper.

  Yarrow. Mynfel. Yarrow. The horned woman and the horned image in the pool. Oh, God, Cat thought. What does it mean? Kothlen— what had he known? Why had he given her the homed lady's name?

  "Mistress Cat?" Toby said, tugging at her sleeve. "What's the matter?"

  "I…"

  Understanding hovered just out of reach. She felt that if she could just push far enough, it would be hers. But the more she concentrated, the more it eluded her. Then the song of the forest, the deep thrum of its roots reverberating like harpstrings against the loam, faded from her mind and the moment was gone. All that remained was a tangle of riddles, more vexing than ever. She shook her head slowly.

  "I just felt… strange for a moment," she said. She tried to keep her voice light. "But I'm fine now. Come on. We should get going."

  They went on. Toby chattered, relating one impossible story after another, but Cat was only half listening. She worried at the riddles, trying to separate one from the other, but they were all so entwined that the tangle just got worse instead of better. Then they arrived at the wood's central glade and Cat paused again, staring across the moonlit grass.

  "The pool," she said.

  "Will you look in it again?" Toby asked.

  "I don't know if I should. Or if… if I even can."

  Not with what she knew now. But the mystery reared up inside her, the riddles demanded to be solved. The dark water called to her. She found herself walking toward the pool, leaning against the low stone wall, knees on the grass once more, breasts pressed against the cool stone. She looked down at her reflection, but it was no more herself looking back than it had been the last time.

  The horns lifted from her brow like the bare limbs of an autumn tree, and in her eyes was an unfamiliar light. Inside the light… there was the roll of Kothlen's moors, swelling in rounded waves; Redcap Hill, fey and hallowed, Mynfel standing there amidst the stones, silhouetted against the moon. Mynfel whose name was the same as Cat's own secret name.

  Yarrow.

  Some of the riddles began to unravel. She must be Mynfel. And so the Otherworld was her creation— its denizens, companions forged out of her own longing for company. And when they had gone, she'd shaped another companion out of her loneliness— a small man, old and young, like Kothlen and like Ben, but not the same as either, his eyes holding both foolishness and wisdom. He had a knife at his belt and a pack on his back.

  She saw the two of them walking through the oak wood, perceived the shadow that overhung all of her dream world. But she didn't see the shadow as a manifestation of her dream thief's power. Instead she saw it as the terrible realization that none of this, not the vision, not the pool, not the Otherworld itself, was real. The shadow was reality intruding on her delusions.

  A shudder went through her. Truth or lie? Which was it? Another riddle, or did the reflected images mirror the truths that she must always have kept hidden from herself? But that meant—

  She tore her gaze from the visions and stared wildly about her. How could it all seem so real? For all these years… Her gaze fixed on Toby— he was a stranger now. Not dangerous, just not real.

  "Who are you?" she demanded.

  "Nobody important. Just me. Toby Weye. A traveling man, remember? Why are you looking at me like that?"

  She shook her head. "You're not real. None of this is real. I just made you up because everybody else was gone. But none of it has ever been real."

  "Cat…" Toby began, but his voice started to fade. His body took on a certain translucence. For a moment she could see right through him. Then he was gone.

  "No!" she wailed.

  But everything was fading. The trees grew insubstantial. The whole world was disappearing right before her eyes.

  "No!" she cried again.

  Blackness came spinning up inside her. She lost her balance, fell to the ground, but never felt the impact because she was already—

  —awake.

  "Cat? Cat!"

  She snapped her eyes open to find Peter crouching by the couch, his features worried.

  "It's all right," he said. "It was just a dream."

  "But that… that's just…"

  Tears welled up in her eyes and were loosed in a flood. Her throat grew thick with emotion, trapping the words inside her. The truth settled like a hard knot in the pit of her stomach. That was all it had ever been. A dream. Many dreams. Years of dreams. She'd been conspiring against herself, slowly but methodically driving herself insane.

  Peter held her, awkwardly patting her back. She buried her face against his chest, her shoulders heaving as she cried her heart out. She kept trying to explain herself, but the words wouldn't come out.

  "Don't try to talk," Peter murmured. "Just take it easy. You're going to be all right."

  Eventually the sobs subsided. Peter got up to get her some Kleenex. Leaving her alone for the moment, he went into the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea. He knew that he had to give her the time she needed. If he pressed her, it wouldn't do any good. It might just alienate her again. Christ, he wished Ben were here. He'd probably be able to handle this better. Peter thought of phoning him, but by then the tea was ready and Cat had joined him in the kitchen.

  She sat down at the table and accepted the steaming mug gratefully. Cupping her hands around its warmth, she waited until he'd sat down across from her, then haltingly began to relate what had happened in her dream.

  "So it was you with the cats last night?" Ben asked.

  Tiddy Mun nodded. They were just turning down Third Avenue now and the little man was still shivering uncontrollably. Ben gave him a sidelong glance.

  "Scared?" he asked.

  "No. I mean, yes. That is…" Tiddy Mun turned panicky eyes to Ben. "It's the iron of your… your wagon."

  Well, that figured, Ben thought. Didn't the old stories always make mention of the fact that cold iron was anathema to fairy? The little guy was lucky that Ben had Fiberglas screening on the windows of his apartment. He wondered how Tiddy Mun would have gotten him to open the door if there hadn't been, then he realized the way his thoughts were going and shook his head.

  Christ! Here he was going off to do battle with one of Dracula's cousins— his only ally a munchkin from Cat's dreams who was probably more scared than he was— and he was thinking about window screens. What he should be doing was trying to come up with some sort of a plan of action for when they got to Mick's place. The trouble was, every time he started to think about what they were getting themselves into, everything just blocked up inside him. It was like last night all over again. He just wasn't cut out for this kind of stuff. But then again, who was?

  He pulled the cab over to the curb a block east of Mick's apartment and killed the engine.

  "Well, I'm scared," he told his diminutive companion.

  Tiddy Mun regarded him mournfully.

  "No," Ben added. "I'm not backing out. But if there were any other way to handle this…" He shook his head. Picking up the baseball bat, he opened the cab door and stepped ou
t. "Come on, little fella. It's time to get this show on the road."

  Wary of the car's metal, Tiddy Mun joined him on the street. Third Avenue was quiet, untouched by their mounting terror. Ben's shirt stuck on his back in the warm air. His legs were starting to tremble, and he knew that if they didn't get moving soon, he just might not be able to make it at all.

  "The evil is near," Tiddy Mun murmured.

  Ben nodded, his face pale and drawn. "Are there any cats around that you can scare up for us?" he asked.

  "Only Cat's two will listen to me," Tiddy Mun said. "Because they're my friends."

  "Just thought I'd ask," Ben muttered. "Let's go."

  He led the way down the block. Mick's building loomed in the glare of the streetlights. It was a three-story brick and frame structure that had been divided into five apartments— two on each side and one on the top floor. Narrow driveways separated it from its neighbors on either side. Mick's apartment was on the lower west side of the building. Ben glanced at Tiddy Mun, and the little man nodded.

  "It's already inside," he said, replying to Ben's unspoken question.

  "Great."

  Debbie awoke with a splitting headache. She was lying on a strange couch in a strange room and it took her a few moments to orient herself. She felt drained, as though she'd fainted or… or what? There was an emptiness inside her, a sense of violation that made her look down at her body. She was surprised to find that she was still fully clothed, because the way she felt…

  Then it all came back to her. This was Stella's apartment. She and Rick had come here for an after-work drink. And there'd been someone else here. Lucius… Lucius somebody-or-other. With the scar on his cheek and… and his eyes. Compelling eyes. Those eyes— they had stolen something from her.

  She sat up, but too quickly. The room spun in her sight and the throb in her temples quickened. When her vision settled to normal and the pounding in her head became a little more manageable, she took stock of the apartment. Neither Rick nor Lucius were in sight. But Stella… She lay sprawled in an armchair, her head slack against her chest.