Ivory and the Horn

by Charles de Lint

  I wasn’t thinking about ghosts, then.

  She seemed to recognize me, too, because she stood there in the doorway, studying me for what seemed like the longest time, before she finally came in and shut the door behind her.

  “You’re the one who comes to the well on Sundays,” she said as she sat down on the end of my bed. She moved like a I man and sat with her legs spread wide, hands on her knees.

  I nodded numbly and managed to sit back down on my chair again. I left my journal where it lay on the floor.

  “Got a smoke?” she asked. ; How I wished.

  “No,” I told her, finally finding my voice. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Don’t eat much either, seems.”

  “I’m on a diet.”

  She made a hrumphing sound. I wasn’t sure if it was a comment on dieting or if she was just clearing her throat.

  “Who… who are you?” I asked.

  The sense of familiarity was still nagging at me. Having pretty well exhausted everyone I could think of that I knew, I’d actually found myself flipping through the faces of the ghosts I’d called up from the well.

  “No reason to call myself much of anything anymore,” she said, “but once I went by the name of Carter. Ellie Carter.”

  As soon as she said her name, I knew her. Or at least I knew where I’d seen her before. After I first found the motel and then started coming by more or less regularly, I’d tried looking up its history. There was nothing in the morgue at In the City, but that didn’t surprise me once I tracked down a twenty-five-year-old feature in the back issues of The New-ford Star.

  I’d had a copy made of the article, and it was pinned up above my desk back home. There was a picture of Ellie accompanying the article, with the motel behind her. She looked about the same, except shrunk in on herself a little.

  She’d been the owner until—as an article dated five years later told me—business had dropped to such an extent that she couldn’t make her mortgage payments and the bank had foreclosed on her.

  “So’ve you made yourself a wish yet?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, don’t. The well’s cursed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you clean your ears, girl? Or is that a part of your diet as well?”

  “My name’s Brenda.”

  “How long are you planning to stay, Brenda?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Well, the rate’s a dollar a day. You can give me a week in advance and I’ll refund what you’ve got coming back to you if you don’t stay that long.”

  This was insane, I thought, but under her steady gaze I found myself digging the seven dollars out of my meager resources and handing it over to her.

  “You need a receipt?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “Well, have yourself a nice time,” she said, standing up. “Plumbing’s out, so you’ll have to use the outhouse at the back of the field.”

  I hadn’t got around to thinking much about that aspect of the lack of bathroom facilities yet. When I’d had to pee earlier, I’d just done it around the corner near some lilac bushes that had overgrown the south side of the motel.

  “Wait,” I said. “What about the well?”

  She paused at the door. “I’d tell you to stay away from it, but you wouldn’t listen to me anyway, would you? So just don’t make a wish.”

  “Why not?”

  She gave me a tired look, then opened the door and stepped out into the night.

  “Listen to your elders, girl,” she said.

  “My name’s Brenda.”

  “Whatever.”

  She closed the door before I could say anything else. By the time I had reached it and flung it open again, there was no one to be seen. I started out across the parking lot’s pavement until I saw headlights approaching on the highway and quickly ducked back into my room and shut the door. Once the car had passed, I slipped out again, this time shutting the door behind me.

  I walked all around the motel, but I could find no sign of the woman. I wasn’t really expecting to. I hadn’t found any recent sign of anyone when I’d explored the motel earlier in the day, either.

  That’s when I started thinking about ghosts.

  So tonight I’m waiting to see if Ellie’s going to show up again. I want to ask her more about the well. Funny thing is, I’m not scared at all. Ellie may be a ghost, but she’s not frightening. Just a little cranky.

  I wonder how and when she died. I don’t have to guess where. I’ve read enough ghost stories to be able to figure out that much.

  I also wonder if the only reason I saw her last night is because I’m so light-headed from my diet. I’d hate to find out that I’ve suddenly turned into one of those people that Jilly calls “sensitives.” I’ve got enough problems in my life as it is without having to see ghosts every which way I turn when I’m awake as well as when I’m asleep.

  Besides, if I’m going to meet a ghost, I wouldn’t pick one from the wishing well. I’d call up my dad—just to talk to him. I know I can’t bring him back to life or anything, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to know why he quit loving my mom and me.

  18

  Brenda’s apartment was the second story of a three-floor brick house with an attached garage in Crowsea. It stood on a quiet avenue just off Waterhouse, a functional old building, unlike its renovated neighbors. The porch was cluttered with the belongings of Brenda’s downstairs neighbor, who appeared to use it as a sitting room-cum-closet. At the moment it held a pair of mismatched chairs—one wooden, one wicker and well past its prime—several plastic milk crates that appeared to serve as tables or makeshift stools, three pairs of shoes and one Wellington boot, empty coffee mugs, books, magazines and any number of less recognizable items.

  Jilly and Wendy picked their way to the front door and into the foyer which was, if anything, even more messy than the porch. The clutter, Jilly knew, would drive Brenda crazy, she who was so tidy herself. At the second landing, Wendy pressed Brenda’s doorbell. When there was no answer after Wendy had rung the bell for the fifth time, she fished her key ring out of her pocket and unlocked the door. Jilly put her hand on Wendy’s arm, holding her back.

  “I don’t think we should be doing this,” she said.

  “It’s not like we’re breaking in,” Wendy said. “Brenda gave me a spare key herself.”

  “But it doesn’t seem right.”

  “Well, I’m worried,” Wendy told her. “For all we know she fell in the shower and she’s been lying there unconscious for days.”

  “For all we know she’s in bed with Jim and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “We wish,” Wendy said as she went in ahead.

  Jilly followed, reluctantly.

  It was, of course, as tidy inside Brenda’s apartment as it was messy on the porch. Everything was in its place. Magazines were neatly stacked in a squared-off pile on a table beside Brenda’s reading chair. The coasters were all in their holder. There wasn’t one shoe or sock off adventuring by itself on the carpet.

  Her desk was polished until the wood gleamed, and the computer sitting dead center looked as though it had just come out of the showroom. If it weren’t for the corkboard above the desk, bristling with the snarl of papers, pictures and the like pinned to it, Jilly might have thought that Brenda never used her desk at all.

  “Brenda?” Wendy called.

  Jilly’s sympathies lay with the downstairs neighbor. Tidiness wasn’t exactly her own strong point.

  As Wendy went down the hall toward the kitchen, still calling Brenda’s name, Jilly wandered over to the desk and looked at what the corkboard held. It was the only area that made her feel comfortable. Everything thing else in the room was just too perfect. It was as though no one lived here at all.

  Old newspaper clippings vied for space with photographs of Brenda’s friends, shopping lists, an invitation for an opening to one of Jilly’s shows that B
renda hadn’t been able to make, a letter that Jilly dutifully didn’t read, although she wanted to. She liked the handwriting.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” she said as Wendy returned to the living room. “I feel like a burglar.”

  Wendy nodded. “But it’s not just that.”

  Jilly thought about it for a moment. Being in somebody else’s apartment when they weren’t always gave one a certain empty feeling, but Wendy was right. This was different. The place felt abandoned.

  “Maybe she really has gone out of town,” Jilly said.

  “Well, her toothbrush is gone, but her makeup bag is still here, so she can’t have gone far.”

  “We should go,” Jilly said.

  “Just let me leave a note.”

  Jilly wandered over to the window to look out at the street below while Wendy foraged for paper and a pen in the desk. Jilly paused when she looked at Brenda’s plants. They were all drooping. The leaves of one in particular, which grew up along the side of the window, had wilted. Jilly couldn’t remember what it was called, but Geordie had once given her a plant just like it, so she knew it needed to be watered religiously, at least every day. This one looked exactly like hers had if she went away for the weekend and forgot to water it.

  “This isn’t like Brenda,” Jilly said, pointing to the plants. “The Brenda I know would have gotten someone to look after her plants before she left.”

  Wendy nodded. “But she never called me.”

  “Her phone’s been disconnected, remember?”

  Jilly and Wendy exchanged worried glances.

  “I’m getting a really bad feeling about this,” Wendy said.

  Jilly hugged herself, suddenly chilled. “Me, too. I think we should go by her office.”

  “She didn’t tell you?” Greg said.

  Both Jilly and Wendy shook their heads. Jilly leaned closer to his desk, expectantly.

  “I don’t know if I should be the one,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” Jilly said. “You owe me. Who got you backstage at the Mellencamp show last year when you couldn’t get a pass?”

  “We could’ve been arrested for the way you got us in!”

  Jilly gave him a sweet smile. “I didn’t break the window— it just sort of popped open. Besides, you got your story, didn’t you?”

  Greg Sommer was In the City’s resident music critic and one of its feature writers. He was so straight-looking with his short hair, horn-rimmed glasses and slender build that Jilly often wondered how he ever got punk or metal musicians to talk to him.

  “Yeah, I did,” he admitted. “And I got double use Of the material when I covered Lisa Germano’s solo album.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Jilly said. “It’s nothing like what I expected. I never knew that she sang, which is weird, considering what a really great voice she—”

  “Jilly!” Wendy said.

  “Oh. Sorry.” It was so easy for Jilly to get distracted. She shot Wendy a slightly embarrassed look before she turned back to Greg. “You were saying about Brenda?” she prompted him.

  “I wasn’t, actually, but I might as well tell you. She got canned first thing yesterday morning.”

  “What?”

  “Weird, isn’t it? She’s the last person I would’ve thought to get fired—she’s usually so damn conscientious it makes the rest of us look bad. But she’s been acting really strange for the past few weeks. I heard a rumor that she’s got a really bad drug problem and I believe it. She looks completely strung out.”

  Wendy shook her head. “No way does Brenda do drugs.”

  “Well, she’s doing something to herself, because there’s not much left but skin and bones. And it’s happened so fast—just over the last few weeks.” He got a funny look. “Jesus, you don’t think she has AIDS, do you?”

  Just the mention of the disease made all of Jilly’s skin go tight and her heartbeat jump. She’d had three friends die of the disease over the past year. Another two had recently tested HIV-positive. It seemed to be sweeping through the-arts community, cutting down the brightest and the best.

  “Oh, God, I hope not,” she said.

  Wendy stood up. “Brenda doesn’t do drugs and she hasn’t got AIDS,” she said. “Come on, Jilly. We’ve got to go”

  “But you heard what Greg said about the way she looks,” Jilly said as she rose to join her.

  Wendy nodded. “It sounds like she’s finally found a diet that works,” she said grimly. “Except it works too well.”

  She left Greg’s office and walked briskly down the hall towards the stairwell. Jilly only had enough time to quickly thank Greg before she hurried off to catch up to her.

  “I don’t even know where to begin looking for her,” she said as she followed Wendy down the stairs.

  “Maybe we should start with this Jim guy she’s been seeing.”

  Jilly nodded, then looked at her watch. It was past five.

  “He’ll be off work by now,” she said. “The admin staff usually leaves at five.”

  “We can still call the school,” Wendy said. “Somebody there will give you his number.”

  “I haven’t seen her in over two weeks,” Jim told Jilly when she got him on the line. “And she hasn’t called for a couple of days now.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “What’s wrong? Is Brenda in some kind of trouble?”

  Jilly put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Wendy who was standing outside the phone booth. “He wants to know what’s going on. What do I tell him?”

  “The truth,” Wendy said. “We don’t know where she is and we’re worried because of what we’ve been hearing.”

  “Right. And if there’s nothing the matter she’s really going to appreciate our blabbing all her problems to a potential boyfriend.”

  “Hello?” Jim’s voice was tiny in the receiver. “Jilly? Are you still there?”

  “What do I tell him?” Jilly asked, hand still over the mouthpiece.

  “Give it to me,” Wendy said.

  Jilly exchanged places with her but leaned in close so that she could listen as Wendy made up some story about needing to pick up a dress at Brenda’s apartment and they were sorry to have bothered him.

  “Right. Tell him the truth,” Jilly said when Wendy had hung up. “I could’ve told him that kind of truth.”

  “What was I supposed to say? Once you reminded me of how Brenda would react if we did lay it all on him, I didn’t have any other choice.”

  “You did fine,” Jilly assured her.

  They crossed the sidewalk and sat down on a bench. The tail end of rush hour crept by on McKennitt, making both of them happy that they didn’t own a car.

  “Could you imagine putting yourself through that every day?” Jilly said, indicating the crawling traffic with a lazy wave of her hand. “I’d go mad.”

  “But a car is still nice to have when you want to get out of the city,” Wendy said. “Remember when Brenda drove us out to Isabelle’s farm this spring?”

  “Mmm. I could’ve stayed there for a month… .” Jilly’s voice trailed off and she sat up on the bench. “We never checked if Brenda’s car was in the garage.”

  The car was gone.

  “Of course that doesn’t prove anything,” Jilly said.

  She and Wendy walked slowly back up the driveway. When they reached the front of Brenda’s building, they sat down on the bottom steps of the porch, trying to think of what to do next.

  “Just because she’s gone for a drive somewhere on a Saturday afternoon,” Jilly tried, “doesn’t mean anything sinister’s going on.”

  “I suppose. But remember what Greg told us about how she looked?”

  “She looked fine when I saw her,” Jilly said. “Thinner, and a little jittery from having quit smoking, but not sickly.”

  “But that was a few weeks ago,” Wendy said. “Now people are talking about her looking emaciated, like she’s a junkie or something.”

  Jilly
nodded. “I’m not as close to her as you are. I know she’s always going on about her weight and diets, but does she actually have an eating disorder?”

  The Brenda Jilly knew had never weighed under a hundred and twenty-five.

  “She was in therapy in high school,” Wendy said. “Which is when she first started suffering from anorexia. The one time she talked to me about it, she told me that the therapist thought her problems stemmed from her trying to get her father back: If she looked like a little girl instead of a woman, then he’ll love her again.”

  “But her father didn’t abandon his family, did he?” Jilly asked. “I thought he died when she was eight or nine.”

  “He did, which is a kind of abandonment, don’t you think? Anyway, she doesn’t buy into the idea at all, doesn’t think she has a problem anymore.”

  “A classic symptom of denial.”

  Wendy nodded. “All of which makes me even more worried. The way Greg was talking, she’s down to skin and bones.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to lose so much weight so fast,” Jilly said.

  “What if you just stopped eating?” Wendy said. “Your basic starvation diet.”

  Jilly considered that for a moment. “I suppose. You’d have to drink a lot of liquids, though, or the dehydration’d get to you.”

  “It’s still going to leave you weak.”

  Jilly nodded. “And spacey.”

  “I wonder if we should report her as missing?” Wendy wondered aloud.

  “I’ve been that route before,” Jilly said. “There’s not much the police can do until she’s been gone for at least forty-eight hours.”

  “We don’t know how long she’s been gone.”

  “Let’s give it until tomorrow,” Jilly said. “If she’s just gone somewhere for the weekend, she’ll be back in the afternoon or early evening.”

  “And if she’s not?”

  “Then we’ll see my pal Lou. He’ll cut through the red tape for us.”

  “That’s right, he’s a cop, isn’t he?”

  Jilly nodded.