Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  “Trouble is,” Aunt Nancy went on, “is you get into the habit of being who you’re pretending to be. That’s the problem with masks. The reason they’re so seductive is because they’re so easy to put on. And that’s also the reason you should always take care of who you go walking with in the spirit-world because this is a place where masks don’t fit the same as they do on the side of the borders where we normally live. The seams and cracks start to show and whoever you’re here with could come away knowing more about you than you’re comfortable having them know.” She smiled at the pair of them. “You find yourself rambling on too much, the way I’m doing right now.”

  “But we’re interested in all of this,” Ellie said. “Really we are.”

  Hunter nodded in agreement.

  “Or you’re good at sucking up,” Aunt Nancy told them.

  It’s no good, Ellie thought. We can see through you now. But rather than follow that train of thought, she wanted to know more about how things worked, here in the spiritworld.

  “So all these pieces of people’s dreams,” she said. “Is that what makes up the spiritworld?”

  Aunt Nancy shook her head. “Every single being, animal or human or otherwise, owns a little piece of manidò-akì. Yet if you put them all together, they make up but the smallest fraction of what can be found here. It stretches as far and wide as the imagination allows it to—not our imagination, but that which belongs to the land itself.”

  “You’re saying it’s sentient?”

  “I don’t know about that. It’s not like I’ve ever had a conversation with it.” She bent down and picked up a handful of the dry red dirt, letting it sift through her fingers back onto the ground. “But you just have to touch it to know there’s more going on here than dirt we’re walking on. If you listen close enough, you can hear a heartbeat. That’s what we do when we drum, you know. We’re talking to the heartbeat of manidò-akì—the spiritworld.”

  The summoning call swept over them again, louder and stronger than it had been yet. Aunt Nancy straightened up. Her nostrils flared as though she was trying to catch a scent.

  “We’re close now,” she said. She gave them each a considering look. “Where do you think it’s coming from?”

  “Lower down,” Ellie replied immediately, not knowing how she knew.

  Aunt Nancy nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking, too. Maybe one or two abinàs-odey away. Don’t worry,” she added at the puzzled look on Ellie’s face. “It’s just your medicine waking up inside you.”

  She descended the slope, picking her way along a narrow path that took them to the lip of a steep gorge. There another path let them wind their way to the bottom of the gorge. The land changed around them as they went down, changing from badlands to desert. The scrub became cacti and desert brush. The temperature rose a half-dozen degrees. When Ellie looked up, she saw that the sun was at high noon.

  Approaching a turn in the gorge, Aunt Nancy suddenly dropped behind a jumble of boulders. Ellie and Hunter followed suit. Neither spoke, knowing how far their voices could carry in the clear air. When the summoning call swept over them again, it was so close and immediate that Ellie could feel the reverberation of it in her chest like a deep bass note.

  She crept close to where Aunt Nancy crouched and peered over the boulders. What she saw held her motionless. The last thing she’d expected was to see anybody she knew in this place. But there they were, further down the slope of the gorge, Bettina and one of the dark-haired Gentry that she’d first seen in Kellygnow’s backyard. Bettina was obviously generating the summoning call. She sat cross-legged on a broad-flat stone, eyes closed in concentration. Her companion was studying the heights of the gorge on either side, looking slowly from one to the other.

  “It’s Bettina,” Ellie whispered, unable to believe that she was seeing her new friend here, in this place.

  But Aunt Nancy only had eyes for Bettina’s handsome, dark-skinned companion.

  “With one of those-who-came,” she said. “A dog boy. What did you say they called themselves now? The Gentlemen?”

  “Gentry,” Ellie said.

  They all ducked out of sight as Bettina’s companion looked in their direction. Aunt Nancy put her back to the boulders and sat down.

  “One of those,” she said. “Only different, somehow.”

  Hunter looked from Ellie to Aunt Nancy.

  “You actually know these people?” he asked.

  “Bettina lives at Kellygnow,” Ellie explained. “She’s … Chantal, one of the other women I met there, said she was kind of a, I guess you’d say, witch.”

  “She’s a skinwalker,” Aunt Nancy said.

  Hunter glanced at her. “Say what?”

  “She has very old blood—older than that of the creature we’re looking for.”

  “So is that good or bad?”

  “You need to ask that question when we find her in the company of a dog boy?”

  “But you said he was different…”

  Aunt Nancy gave a slow nod. “He’s gone and stolen the body of one of our manitou. That’s what I recognized earlier. His name was Shishòdewe. Walks-at-the-Edge-of-the-Forest.”

  “Um…”

  Aunt Nancy looked to Hunter.

  “Why would he steal a body?” Hunter asked. “Wouldn’t he have one of his own?”

  “Why do those-who-came do any of the things that they do? For the sake of greed. For the sake of power.”

  Ellie didn’t want to think ill of Bettina, but it really didn’t look very good, finding her here in the company of one of the Gentry, calling to the Glasduine the way she was.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Aunt Nancy seemed to slump into herself, becoming suddenly smaller, older, more frail.

  “Truly, I don’t know,” she said. “If we stop them before they bring the Glasduine here, we lose our chance at the monster. If we wait until it comes, we will have the three of them standing against us.”

  “Maybe more,” Hunter put in, his voice gloomy. “I’ve never seen those Gentry on their own. There’s probably more of them around.”

  Ellie began to worriedly inspect the surrounding landscape.

  “I don’t sense anyone else close by,” Aunt Nancy said.

  Ellie returned her attention to the older woman.

  “Can’t you use all this … this magic that’s supposed to be in me to do something?”

  “I don’t trust myself to make the right decision,” Aunt Nancy said.

  “How can you say that? You’re the medicine woman. You’re supposed to know everything.”

  “The trick to being a good leader is to be decisive and to appear to know everything. But seeing what was done to Shishòdewe and knowing that what they are calling here is a hundred times more powerful…” Aunt Nancy shook her head. “I suddenly feel like an old woman, way out of her depth.”

  “No,” Ellie said. “You can’t bail out now. You’re the one who knows how to use whatever this is I’ve got inside me. I can’t do it by myself.”

  As they were speaking, Hunter had eased back up to peer over the boulders. He leaned on one of the stones and looked down.

  “Something’s happening down there,” he said.

  But before either of the women could reply, their heads were filled with a towering, raging voice that knocked them to the ground. Above them, Hunter slumped forward, his head falling onto his forearms. Where his companions were only momentarily incapacitated, the sheer power of that intruding roar had rendered him unconscious.

  6

  Miki stood out on the lawn with Salvador and the others, acutely aware of the freezing rain that was now drying on the slicker Salvador had lent her. She stared at where they’d been told that the Glasduine had simply bulled its way through the window of the studio, taking down a good part of the wall in the process. She tried to imagine the size and strength the creature had to be to do this sort of damage, and couldn’t even begin to. But she had a clear enough picture of
what it would look like. All she had to do was think of Donal’s painting, that hybrid beast that had made up its central image, part human, part tree. Except, notwithstanding her experiences with the Gentry, never mind this between place in which she and Salvador now found themselves, how could such a thing even be real?

  “You’re sure it wasn’t a bomb?” she said.

  Kellygnow’s housekeeper shook her head. “Oh, we’re very sure of that.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  Salvador nodded slowly at her side. “Madre de Dios,” he muttered. “I’m gone only a day and look at this.”

  When she and Salvador had come around to the back of the house it was to find the red-haired housekeeper Nuala having an animated discussion with three Natives: two women she didn’t know and this guy named Tommy who came into the record store from time to time. The weird thing was, the bloody foul weather didn’t appear to affect any of them. They weren’t wet or cold or anyway near as miserable as she was feeling. It was like they were standing on the other side of a window, looking in at the freezing drizzle from someplace else. Which is exactly what it turned out to be when they drew her and Salvador into what one of them described as the between.

  Salvador made the sign of the cross at the transition. Miki just wanted to throw up, and probably would have, except Tommy gave her and Salvador each a spice cookie that took their nausea completely away.

  “Does this work for a hangover?” she asked.

  “Probably,” Tommy told her.

  The Native women turned out to be a couple of his aunts, Sunday and Zulema. They were friendly enough, and Tommy had recognized her right away, giving her a big smile as soon as they approached, but Nuala’s reaction had been a seriously antagonistic frown, as though her and Salvador’s presence here was just one more complication that she didn’t need. Miki was glad it was Salvador who worked here instead of her; if Hunter treated her like this back at the store, she’d quit. Or whack him across the back of the head to smarten him up. She couldn’t do that here, of course. And then, when the housekeeper found out that Miki was Donal’s sister, the cold front had really moved in. Surprisingly, it was Salvador who immediately came to her defense, for all that he barely knew her.

  “Do not be so quick to judge,” he told Nuala. “She came all this way, in this weather, to help you. It’s not her fault she is too late to stop her brother.”

  Miki thought the housekeeper was going to bite off his head, she gave Salvador such a hard stare, but then the woman sighed.

  “You’re right,” she told Salvador, then turned to Miki. “I’m sorry. This hasn’t been the best of days.”

  Miki nodded. “So where did the creature go?”

  “Into the spiritworld,” one of Tommy’s aunts said. It took Miki a moment to remember her name. Sunday.

  “And Donal… ?”

  “He is the Glasduine’s host,” Nuala said.

  Miki had known this, but she’d needed to hear someone say it all the same. But even hearing it said, the words hanging there in the air between them, it was simply too big for her to process. Donal was really gone. Swallowed into some pathetic piece of half-baked mythology that shouldn’t have been able to exist in the first place. How could her Uncle Fergus and his loser cronies have been right? Why would any supernatural being listen to the likes of them, or Donal for that matter?

  “What about the Gentry?” she asked, more to distract herself than because she actually wanted to know. “The last time I saw them I was sure they were headed this way.”

  The housekeeper’s gaze clouded for a long moment before she finally replied. “Happily, they at least have been absent.”

  “You must let us into the room where the Glasduine was called forth,” the other aunt, Zulema, said. She was obviously continuing the argument that Miki and Salvador’s arrival had interrupted. “Unless we can track it to where it crossed over, we won’t be able to block its return from the spiritworld.”

  “An admirable objective,” Nuala said, “but there will be no more magics called up inside Kellygnow. There has already been enough damage done.”

  “You don’t understand. If we don’t—”

  “No, I understand all too well,” Nuala told her. “This house is under my charge and I will not allow it to be used as a battleground.”

  “There will be no battles fought inside its walls,” Sunday assured her.

  “And you can guarantee this?”

  “Because I am no stranger to enchantment,” Nuala said. “You must know as well as I do that every time a spell is cast, it leaves a door ajar to the spirit-world. Those rifts can linger open for weeks, even months. I will not have Kellygnow riddled with the remnants of your spells and enchantments.”

  “Why don’t you do it from outside the window where the Glasduine broke through?” Tommy asked. “Wouldn’t that be close enough?”

  His aunts looked to Nuala.

  “Will you allow us that much?” Zulema asked.

  The housekeeper hesitated.

  “Don’t forget,” Sunday added. “If we don’t block the Glasduine’s return to this world, who’s to say that, when the creature does come back, it won’t smash in a few more of your precious walls? Are you capable of standing up to it by yourself?”

  “She will not be alone,” Salvador said. “There will be no more smashing of walls while I am here.”

  If determination alone could stop the Glasduine, Miki thought, it would be hard pressed to get past the combination of Salvador and the housekeeper.

  But Nuala gave up. She put a hand on the gardener’s arm.

  “They’re right,” she said. “There’s no way we could hope to stop the Glasduine on our own. Go ahead,” she added to Tommy’s aunts. “Only, please. Try to be careful with what you call up.”

  “Thank you,” Sunday said.

  Zulema nodded. “You could help us. Your own medicine runs strong and by helping us, you would be there to keep watch and sweep away any residue my sister and I might miss.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “We don’t plan any sort of complicated ceremony,” Sunday assured her. “More a mild form of divination. We only want to call up a memory of the Glasduine’s passage so that we can then track it to where it crossed over.”

  Nuala remained reluctant, but gave in. “Very well. I will help you.”

  “It would be better if we had a drum,” Zulema said. “Do you have one in the house? We didn’t think to bring one.”

  “A drum,” Nuala repeated.

  “It will make it easier to connect to the world’s heartbeat,” Sunday explained. “So the manitou will hear us.”

  Nuala nodded in understanding. “I don’t have one,” she said. “But I do have something else that would work.”

  She left them to go into the house. Tommy’s aunts stepped through the rubble to get closer to the wall, with Salvador trailing along behind. Miki took the time to light a cigarette, then she turned to Tommy.

  “So do you do a lot of this in your spare time?” she asked.

  “Yeah, right. This is as new to me as it is to you.”

  “Hey, I could be some big-time sorceress. How would you know?”

  He only smiled and shook his head. “And that’s why you work in a record store.”

  “It could be my secret identity.”

  “Could be,” Tommy agreed. “Just like I’ve got a harem of supermodels waiting for me at home for when we’re done here.”

  Miki sighed. “Bloody hell. Can you believe we’re actually here, taking any of this seriously?”

  “It’s probably a little easier for me,” Tommy said. “I mean, these are my aunts, after all. The thing is, I just always thought it was stories, all this talk of manidò-akì and manitou”

  “Yeah, I had my own fill of fairy tales when I was growing up.”

  They fell silent when Nuala returned. She carried a small brassy-looking dish about the size of a salad bowl that Miki recognized from having seen
a bunch of them in a shop on Lee Street specializing in jewelry and clothing imported from the Far East. Their stock also included all kinds of incense and soaps, statues and knickknacks, bamboo flutes, meditation mats, but it was the Tibetan singing bowls like the one Nuala was carrying that had really captured Miki’s fancy. The store’s stock had ranged from those tiny enough to hold in the palm of your hand to one so big it would take a couple of husky men to simply lift it.

  The shopkeeper had talked about the seven different metals that were used in the casting of the bowls, showed her the wooden stick shaped like a pestle that was used to play it, and then demonstrated how the bowls were used. First he tapped the stick against the side of the bowl, waking a clear, bell-like sound that seemed to ring for ages. But what had really sold Miki on them was when he rubbed the stick around the lip of the bowl. It was like the way you could get a musical note using a wet finger on the rim of a wineglass, but the sound he woke from the bowl was like the voice of the earth itself, a low, thrumming sound that felt as though it was coming up from the center of the world to resonate deep in her chest and belly.

  She would have bought one then and there, but if she was to have one, she’d want one of the big ones, and they were selling for a few hundred dollars, which she couldn’t possibly afford at the time.

  “What’s with the Tibetan bowl? Tommy asked Nuala, obviously recognizing the instrument as well. “I thought you were Irish.”

  “Should we all be defined by only one facet of who we are?” she replied. “Would you prefer to only be known as an Indian? Or the driver of one of Angel’s vans? As an abused child? As a recovered alcoholic? Or aren’t you all these things and more?”

  Tommy flushed. “How do you know all this?”

  “How can she not?” Sunday said, laying a hand on his shoulder. She gave Nuala a small, respectful bow. “I see now that you are a manitou yourself. Far from home, perhaps, but no less venerable because of that.”

  Nuala gave a dismissive wave with her hand. “I’m only a housekeeper.”