Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  For a moment she thought Aunt Nancy was going to get all pissed-off again, but then the older woman slowly shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “But there are things we can try.”

  When Aunt Nancy turned and left the doorway, the room seemed to brighten, as though some of the shadows had followed after her. Ellie tried not to think of that huge spider presence she kept seeing behind Aunt Nancy. She didn’t need this, any of this, the magic and the scariness and the way her whole life seemed to be slowly dissolving into one that belonged to a stranger.

  The problem was, no one was listening to her. No one was coming up to her and saying, it’s okay, we’ll take it from here. Instead it was just more and deeper weirdness every time she turned around.

  She waited a long heartbeat. No one was calling her, but she knew they were waiting for her all the same.

  I don’t have anything except for inexperience and disbelief, she wanted to tell them, but that didn’t cut it anymore. Not with all she’d seen. Not with manitou and the powerful Gentry and the spider shadow and this thing inside her, this tearing sensation like an open wound.

  Deal with it, she told herself.

  Yeah, right.

  Slowly she lowered her feet to the floor and got up to follow Aunt Nancy oimgt into the main room of the house.

  6

  It was mostly the writers who took up residence in the cabins behind Kellygnow. Bettina wasn’t sure why. Perhaps they felt solitude a closer companion, here under the trees, than it could be in the house itself. Except Penny Angelis stayed in one of the cabins and she seemed to spend most of her time in the house, hanging out in the kitchen, gossiping with the various artists in their studios, writing in the library, so what did that say? That people were different, Bettina supposed.

  She and Chantal passed by Penny’s cabin without bothering to check it since the blonde writer was already accounted for, and moved on to the last of the small outbuildings. It stood on the edge of the property, just before the land took its sudden plunge to the city’s streets far below in a tumbling waterfall of granite, hemlocks, and cedar.

  “This is August’s cabin, isn’t it?” Chantal said as they drew near.

  Bettina nodded. “Though I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  It was true. August Walker wasn’t the most sociable of Kellygnow’s residents, but sociability wasn’t exactly a prerequisite. Only talent was. The one slim volume of his work that Bettina had read was astonishing. Tender, wry, lyric, warm. Not one adjective that would have suited the author himself. He was almost as much of a recluse as the mysterious Musgrave Wood.

  “It’s funny,” she said, thinking of how she’d kept returning to passages in August’s book, simply to savor their beauty. “You’d never think, from reading him, that he could be so—”

  She was unable to finish. A nova flare of white light exploded between her temples and she dropped to her knees as though she’d been physically struck. Chantal immediately crouched in the snow beside her, her knees crunching through the icy crust. She put her arms around Bettina’s shoulders, her gaze darting nervously about.

  “Bettina!” she cried. “What is it? What happened?”

  Bettina allowed her to help her sit up. For a moment she couldn’t speak. All she could do was look at the house while the intense pain in her head slowly faded to a dull ache.

  “Something old and dangerous has been called into the world,” she finally said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In the house,” Bettina said. “Someone has torn through the fabric of the world…”

  Someone? Her pulse quickened. Not someone. Donal Greer. So eager to get out of the wet and cold when he had barely seemed to be touched by the weather. Of course. He’d been waiting in the between for an opportunity to get inside the house and commandeer the mask.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” a voice said.

  Bettina looked away from the house to find her wolf leaning against the trunk of a tree, his own gaze fixed on Kellygnow. His pose was as languid as ever, but his dark eyes glinted with tension.

  “Who’re you?” Chantal asked, obviously disconcerted at his sudden appearance.

  “Está bien,” Bettina said. She rose slowly to her feet, grateful for Chantal’s arm to keep her steady. “It’s okay. He’s a friend … I think.”

  “You never answered my question from last night,” el lobe said.

  “I haven’t had time to think about it with all the trouble this storm has brought.”

  “And now it’s too late. They have their monster.”

  Bettina shook her head. “This is different. Ellie never finished the mask.”

  “Then what was screaming inside my head a few moments ago?” el lobo asked.

  “A man named Donal Greer.”

  “I know him. He’s a puppy. Desperate to run with the pack, but he lacks the geasan to be more than a hanger-on.”

  By geasan Bettina intuited he meant brujería. Though he might have meant cojones.

  “Quizá, quizá, no,” she said. “But all the same he was able to wake some old forest spirit with nothing more than his will and that broken mask.”

  El lobo returned his gaze to the house once more.

  “I see,” he said softly.

  “Well, I don’t,” Chantal said. “Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Where to begin?” Bettina said. “We’ve stumbled into what my papa once warned me against, and in no uncertain terms: a struggle between the spirits that has spilled out of la época del mito into this world of ours.”

  “And this época de whatever would be what?”

  “The spiritworld.”

  “Of course.” Chantal looked from Bettina to el lobo. “And you’re the good guys, right?”

  Bettina shook her head. “I don’t even want to be involved, but …so que va. Here I am in the middle of it all the same.”

  “And tall dark here?” Chantal asked.

  She left “handsome” unsaid, but el lobo stood straighter and smiled all the same.

  “He is … related to those on one side of the struggle.”

  “Oh, well put,” el lobo said. “I am Scathmadra,” he added, bowing slightly to Chantal and offering her his hand. “At your service.”

  Chantal shook his hand and introduced herself.

  “I know what your name means,” Bettina told him. “Surely you can come up with something better?”

  “Than the truth?” he said.

  “I am so far out of my depth here,” Chantal began, “that I don’t even—”

  She broke off as they heard a great crash from the direction of the house. It was the sound of masonry collapsing, breaking glass, stone blocks tumbling against each other. They turned as one toward Kellygnow.

  “¿Qué …?” Bettina said.

  She’d thought for a moment that one of the towering oaks had come down upon the house, but she soon saw it was something worse. A great, ragged gap had been pounded out in a portion of the wall facing them. Through it came such a creature that even Bettina, in all she had experienced in her travels through la época del mito, had never seen the like of before.

  It was tall and broad-shouldered with a man’s shape, but the proportions were not quite right and its skin seemed more like rough bark than human flesh. The mask Bettina remembered from Ellie’s worktable was now a face, fluid, mobile, dark-eyed. Its scraggly hair and beard were a thick tangle of vines. Branches sprouted from its temples like a stag’s antlers. A cloak of bark and leaves and tangled vines fell from its shoulders. Caught up in the folds of the cloak and pushing up out of the creature’s barklike skin were feathers and bits of fur, moss, fungi, and other less recognizable things.

  The creature moved awkwardly, as though uncomfortable in, or unused to its body. For a long moment none of them could speak. They watched it lumber into the woods, its gait growing more graceful with
each step. By the time it was lost from their sight, it was moving soundlessly, slipping between the trees like a whisper.

  “Madre de Dios,” Bettina murmured finally.

  “Indeed,” el lobo said. “The Glasduine is woken and won’t this keep the pack busy. There will be no war between them and the local spirits now.”

  Bettina gave him a questioning look.

  “Think of it,” he told her. “The pack was to be the creature’s master. Now they will be the hunted.”

  “Why would it go after them?”

  El lobo shook his head, as though he was dealing with a child.

  “Do you think the Glasduine wouldn’t know what they had planned for it?” he said. “How they would profane its mystery and glory?”

  “Sí,” Bettina agreed. “If it was only that great spirit on its own. But Donal called it up. His desires will set its emotional balance.”

  “If you would know how the pack treated that pup,” el lobo said, “then you would know for certain how not one of them is now safe.”

  “Sí, pero todavía…”

  But el lobo was already gone, stepping into la época del mito. Bettina heard Chantal gasp beside her. Of course. To her friend it would seem as though the wolf had simply disappeared. She gave Chantal a sympathetic look.

  “It can’t be easy,” she said. “So many marvels, all at once.”

  Chantal gave a slow nod. “Remember when I was saying I’d like to be able to see the stuff you do? Well, I take it back—okay?”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “I kind of thought you’d say something like that.” She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Okay. I’m going to deal with it. One step at a time—if I get to choose the pace at all.”

  “This is new to me as well,” Bettina said. “I can’t promise anything.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Bettina pulled her gaze away from where the creature had disappeared to look back at the house.

  “We should make sure no one was hurt,” she said.

  Chantal nodded and fell into step beside her.

  “You know what it looked like?” she said after a moment. “That thing that came out of the house? Like those Green Men from British folklore. You see the image all over the place in England, in churches and the like.”

  “Donal said something about that.”

  Donal had said a lot, Bettina remembered, that morning when he and Ellie had first come to the house. Much of it, in retrospect, unpleasant. He’d subscribed such hedonistic and shallow impulses to the Glasduine he remembered from his own childhood stories. If those were what he was using to focus its spirit, the creature would indeed be a monster.

  “But I don’t remember those Green Men being thought of as evil,” Chantal went on. “They were more like primal forest spirits. Jack-in-the-Green. Robin Hood. Even Shakespeare’s Puck. More like a trickster than something nasty.”

  “Old spirits such as they dwell too far away from the world now,” Bettina said. “They live deep in the spiritworld, deeper than most travelers can access. To be able to return, they need a vessel to hold their spirit and that’s usually a man or a woman. The trouble is, the vessel brings his or her own influences into what has been called forth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When you bring something like that into the world,” Bettina explained, “it takes on your characteristics. If you’re kind, it will be a benevolent spirit. But if you are mean-spirited …”

  “Oh, I get it,” Chantal said. “And this Donal guy, he’s … ?”

  “Very troubled,” Bettina told her. “I saw a lot of unhappiness and darkness in him. There was goodness as well, but it was a servant to the shadows, not its master.”

  She put up a hand suddenly and brought Chantal to a stop.

  “What… ?”

  Bettina put a finger to Chantal’s lips. “Wait,” she said, her voice pitched soft.

  Ahead of them they saw the Recluse leave her cabin and stare across the back lawn to where the hole gaped in the side of the house. She began to walk over to it, but then Nuala stepped out of the gap and clambered across the rubble. Nuala met the Recluse halfway across the lawn where an animated argument ensued.

  “I’m going to do something that will feel odd to you,” Bettina said, still whispering, “but I need to get closer to them to hear what they’re saying and I don’t have time to explain.”

  Before Chantal could question her, she pulled the other woman with her into the between, deep enough inside so that they wouldn’t be easily remarked by anyone who might look their way, but not so far that they would miss what was being said.

  Chantal leaned against her. “I think I feel sick to my stomach.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bettina said.

  She would have left Chantal behind, but she was afraid of the creature circling back through the woods and coming upon the sculptor.

  “It will pass,” she assured Chantal.

  “Not quick enough to suit me,” Chantal grumbled.

  Her face had gone pale and perspiration beaded on her brow.

  “Truly,” Bettina said. “I’m sorry.”

  Chantal tried to smile. “What did I tell you about apologizing all the time?”

  Eh, bien, Bettina thought. She would make it up to her friend, that was a promise. But for now she took Chantal’s hand and led her closer to where Nuala and Musgrave Wood were arguing. The freezing rain had plastered the women’s hair to their faces, a rain that Bettina and Chantal no longer felt in the between.

  “—wake such a thing inside?” Nuala was saying. She was angrier than Bettina had ever seen her, her brujería flashing in her eyes. “Someone could have been killed.”

  “This wasn’t what we had planned when—”

  But Nuala wasn’t listening. “I thought I’d made it clear. Kellygnow is under my protection and I will not have you playing the Morgana within her walls.”

  “Don’t you dare take that tone with me,” Musgrave told her, standing taller, glaring at the other woman. “You forget who I am. You are here only on my sufferance.”

  Nuala shook her head.

  “And if it wasn’t for me,” Musgrave went on, “the Gentry would have taken you down from that high horse of yours a very long ago.”

  Nuala laughed, but without humor. “Is that what they told you?”

  “I know what I know.”

  “Then mark this, woman. I have always been what you only pretend to be.”

  “Don’t you—”

  “And,” Nuala went on, “I have what they don’t. I have a home; they have only the wilds.”

  When she said that, Bettina was reminded of her first encounter with her cadejos, those rainbow dogs who had been silent for so long, silent because she’d turned away and refused to listen to them after the death dog had stolen her abuela away. They, too, had spoken so longingly of a home, had been so grateful to find it in her. She felt a sudden shame to have denied them for so long, for she knew what Nuala was saying was true. All spirits yearned for a home. To be grounded in one place, to have a safe haven waiting for them no matter how far their wanderings might take them.

  She wanted to listen for her cadejos right now, to call to them, but she couldn’t concentrate with the argument going on in front of her.

  Musgrave was shaking her head. “You don’t have any power …”

  Nuala’s laughter darkened. “Power? Power is for little boys such as those wolves you run with. It’s a hurtful thing—have you not understood that yet?”

  “You can say that, being what you are. Death has no hold on you.”

  “Oh, no, Sarah,” Nuala said.

  Her voice had taken on a sympathetic tone. Bettina and Chantal exchanged glances, the same question rising in both of them. Sarah?

  “That’s another Gentry lie,” Nuala went on. “We can die as readily as a human. Perhaps not by illness or age, but by accident and murder, certainly. The difference i
s, not all of us fear dying.”

  “Says the immortal,” Musgrave said, bitter. “Death doesn’t wait for you around every corner. It doesn’t require you to make bargains with the wolves simply to maintain your health.”

  Nuala shook her head. “No,” she said. “So says one who lives in harmony with life, who knows that it is defined by its limitations. Who sees death not as the closing of a door, but the opening of one.”

  “I can’t believe you,” Musgrave told her.

  “I know. That is why I live in your house, why I have the home, while you live in the wilds with the wolves.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “There is always choice,” Nuala told her. But she seemed to be growing tired of the argument, and her tone grew less sympathetic. “And here is one you will not forget again: in future, choose to keep your games out of the house, or truly, you will understand what suffering can be.”

  “You—”

  “Listen to me,” Nuala told her, her voice hard now. “I am older than those wolves you run with and I am patient, but my patience has limits. Leave me and the house in peace. Do not involve the residents in your games. Ignore my request again and I will wake the salmon and you will finally understand what change means.”

  Musgrave took a quick step back from the other woman.

  “What?” Nuala said. “Do you think I haven’t seen you sniffing around his pool, your little mind whirring as you try to see a way to steal his wisdom without risking his waking?”

  Musgrave turned abruptly and stalked back to her cabin. Her route took her within a few feet of where Bettina and Chantal were standing in the between, but she took no notice of them.

  “They really can’t see us, can they?” Chantal whispered to Bettina.

  “Or hear us. Are you feeling better now?”

  Chantal nodded. “Do you understand any of what they’re talking about?”

  “Not everything,” Bettina told her. “But it has cleared up some things that were puzzling me. Unfortunately, none of it helps in dealing with this creature Donal has pulled into the world.”

  She paused suddenly, realizing that while Musgrave had been oblivious to their presence, Nuala had not been so easily fooled. Of course she wouldn’t be, if all she’d told the Recluse was true. Sighing, Bettina took Chantal by the hand again and stepped back into the world, back into the winter with its wet snow underfoot, the chill in the air and the freezing rain.