The Onion Girl (27 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“What's so important about her anyway?” Bo asks.
“She's a friend,” I tell him. That should say it all, and it does. Except …
“I understand that,” Bo says. “But there's something else going on there, too. She's got this big burning light in her like I've never seen before.”
“I don't know,” I say. “But it means something. She's in this world for a reason.”
“Everybody's in this world for a reason,” Jack says, and for once his voice hasn't got the trace of a smile in it.
I nod. “Except that light tells me that the reason she's here could make a big difference for more people than either you or I could ever touch.”
“You've got to see her for yourself,” Bo tells Jack. “Then you'll understand.”
Jack looks from him to me.
I try to explain. “She's like … like …”
I can't find the words. I look past the fire and for that moment before my night sight kicks in, all I see is darkness. Then one by one, the stars start to appear. The moon, so big and bright it's almost white.
“She's like those unicorns,” I tell Jack finally. “Got a fire in her that just makes you feel good to stand beside, warming your soul.”
We fall quiet then. Bo helps himself to my coffee and my tobacco pouch, rolls a smoke for each of us that Jack lights with his Zippo.
“Wasn't that Cody's?” Bo asks.
Jack nods. “I won it from him in a card game.” He gives Bo a considering
glance. “But since we're talking about Cody, isn't this his
manidò-tewin?”
“Was,” Bo says. “He's got a new place now, all sunshine and flowers. Imagine a desert where the saguaro and other cacti are always in bloom and everywhere you walk, the ground's thick with yellow poppies and pink fairy dusters.”
I smile. “So he's really in love.”
Bo nods.
“And what about you?” Jack asks.
“Me?” Bo says.
He gets a look, you can tell his gaze has gone inward, found some past time that maybe he doesn't want to remember, but he can't help going back to it, again and again, worrying at it the way you pick at a scab. Keep picking at it and it never gets the chance to heal.
Bo sighs. “Me, I've got a use for a lonely place like this now. I'm like the Old Woman in that way, I guess. The more I walk in the outside world, the more it hurts. Can't get no rest from it except when I'm here.”
Jack turns to me. “You see what I'm talking about here? That's why we've got to stop those wolves. Bad enough they do what they do to themselves and their own world. And maybe we can't stop it there. But we can stop them from doing it here.”
“Close the dreaming doors on them,” I say, “so they can't ever come back.”
That's what I'm good at—must be the crow in me. Opening and closing the doors of the spirit.
But Jack's shaking his head. I expected as much. He already told me what he thinks we've got to do.
“No,” he says. “That won't be enough for the likes of them. We've just got to put them down.”
“Dog gets the sickness,” Bo says, “you can't let it live.”
I think again about that body we found, the dark glee in the eyes of those wolves, tearing at its flesh, drinking down the hot fire of its blood.
“Yeah, you're right,” I say. I can't keep the reluctance from my voice, but I know it's what we've got to do. “She was strong, the one leading that pack. Close a door on her and she'll just find another way to get in.” I let my gaze settle on Jack's face. “But how are we going to find them?
Manidò-akì's
a big old world. We could be chasing them for the rest of our lives.”
But Jack's shaking his head again. “We don't have to find them,” he says. “They're going to find us. I saw the look in their eyes when we chased them off. They never knew anything like us even existed. I'll bet you even money they'll be looking for us, wanting to know how sweet our blood tastes.”
Bo's features shift from the human who was drinking coffee from my tin mug to the feral grin of a coyote.
“And then we take them down,” he says.
I'm still thinking about those wolves. There was something that bothered me about them, something familiar, but I still can't place it. I only know it's going to prove that old truism once again: if it can get complicated, it will. Story of my life, lately.
But I give a slow nod in agreement.
“Then we take them down,” I say.
I only hope we're not making the mistake that Cody always makes: trying to do what you think is right, but only screwing things up until they're worse than they ever were.
NEWFORD, MAY 1999
Sophie couldn't explain why she invariably
went into immediate denial mode the moment the subject of the dreamlands came up. No matter what she might tell anybody else, she knew they were real. She just couldn't talk about them as if they were.
Sometimes she wondered if this inability was pure selfishness on her part, that admitting they were real to anybody else wouldn't make them special for her anymore. Wouldn't make
her
special. In her heart she knew that wasn't true. Other people had access to the dreamlands—a lot of them more so than her. She only had to think of someone like Joe who moved as easily back and forth between the worlds as anybody else might cross a street.
But still she couldn't shake the thought that by admitting they were real rather than simply dreams, she might lose her own connection to them.
It was an awful thing to contemplate. She liked to think of herself as a generous person, especially when it came to Jilly and Wendy. She honestly believed that she was willing to share anything and everything with
them, and it would be so much fun to have them with her when she crossed over to Mabon. But every time the subject of the reality of that other world came up, she could feel something close up inside her and denials came swimming up into her side of the conversation.
The rational part of Wendy's mind seemed happy to accept these denials—yes, the world is what we see, no more, no less, and everything else belongs to illusion and dream—but Sophie knew that it drove Jilly a little crazy sometimes. And maybe even hurt her as well, though she never said as much. Still, Jilly rarely talked about anything that really troubled her, not the old hurts or any new ones that might come up, so that wasn't something this could be measured against.
The accident that had put her in the hospital and what had happened to her faerie paintings were perfect examples, Sophie thought as she entered the rehab building and walked down the hall to Jilly's room. It was close to the end of visiting hours and night's quiet was stealing back into the building. Her footsteps echoed on the marble floor and she could smell a faint whiff of incense as. she neared the room of the practicing Buddhist who was Jilly's neighbor.
Jilly was sleeping when Sophie stepped into her room, or at least her eyes were closed. Sophie paused for a moment in the doorway, remembering again that odd feeling of the world going a-kilter when she'd thought she'd seen Jilly coming out of her Yoors Street loft the other day. Impossible, of course. It hadn't been Jilly.
“Are you coming in?”
Sophie blinked to find Jilly looking at her, a slightly lopsided smile tugging at her lips. The paralysis had mostly left her face and her speech was now as clear as it had ever been. If only the rest of it would go away.
“I thought you were asleep,” she said.
Jilly gave a small shake of her head. “Just resting. I had a busy day.”
Sophie came into the room and sat on the side of the bed. Knowing what she did of Jilly's exercise schedule, the comment wasn't an overstatement.
“I half expected to still find a gang of people in here,” she said.
“It's been quieting down a little,” Jilly told her. “Which is kind of a relief. I mean, I love that everybody's been so supportive and everything, but the broken body's pretty obvious lying here on the bed and it gets in between any chance of relating with people on any kind of a normal level.”
“They're looking at you, but not looking.”
“Exactly. It's a really weird feeling. And people you wouldn't expect, either. Like Isabelle. The whole time she's visiting, she's just focused on my face.”
“I guess it makes some people uncomfortable.”
“I suppose. But enough about the trials and tribulations of the bedridden. What brings you back today?”
Sophie had already visited this morning.
“I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things,” she said.
Jilly made an exaggerated grimace. “Uh-oh.”
“Nothing too serious,” Sophie said, then corrected herself. “Well, maybe a little.”
“I had nothing to do with it. I was somewhere else. I've never even met whoever it is that claims I did it.”
Sophie had to laugh. “You don't even know what it is that I want to talk to you about.”
“I know. But I thought I'd get my excuses in first.”
“It's nothing you need to be excused for.”
“Well, that's a relief.”
Sophie shook her head and regarded her friend for a moment. It was nice to see that Jilly had regained a bit of her silly good humor. Sophie had missed that these past few weeks. It made it feel a little bit like old times, except Jilly wasn't bouncing around the room while she was declaiming her innocence, or sitting sideways on some easy chair, limbs dangling over its arms, displaying all the nonchalance of a drowsy cat. The return of her good spirits was more than welcome. That they seemed genuine as well was even better.
“I was wondering about the dreamlands,” Sophie said. “You haven't really been talking about them as much lately.”
“Ah, the dreamlands,” Jilly replied.
Something guarded came into her eyes and Sophie felt a twinge of disappointment that there could be secrets between them where there never had been before.
“Wonderful place,” Jilly told her. “Though they're not real, of course.”
Sophie's twinge became the point of a knife darting straight for her heart.
“I suppose I deserved that,” she said.
Jilly gave her a puzzled look, then smiled. “Oh, I see. You think I'm just saying that because you're always denying them being a real place.”
“Aren't you?”
“Maybe a little.”
Jilly's gaze went past her, as if looking at something that lay far beyond the wall behind her.
“But it's funny,” Jilly went on. “I find that the more time I spend there, the more reluctant I am to talk about them. Or at least talk about how they relate to the World As It Is, or whether or not they're real.”
“Because you think, if you do, they might be taken away?”
Jilly's surprise was plain. “Something like that. How did you …” Her voice trailed off and then she grinned. “You feel the same way, don't you? That's why you talk about them the way you do … or rather don't.”
Sophie gave her a reluctant nod. Even that seemed to be too much conversation about them. She could feel a tightening in her chest, but under it was another, almost alien feeling. The sense that she'd stepped up to a door in a locked room only to find that it had opened under her touch and freedom lay just beyond. She took a steadying breath.
“I can't explain it,” she told Jilly.
“I don't think you have to,” Jilly said. “At least not to me, because I know exactly what you mean.”
“Why do you think it's like that?”
Jilly slowly shook her head and Sophie found herself focused for a moment on how wonderful it was that Jilly had that much motion back.
“Who knows?” Jilly said. “Maybe it's some kind of a safety mechanism for the place itself. I imagine that if too many people believed in the dreamlands and realized how they can manipulate what they find there, the place would turn into total chaos.”
“It already is in a lot of places.”
Jilly smiled. “That's what Joe says when he's in teacher mode. And maybe that's another reason we find ourselves kind of denying the dreamlands. Maybe it's a safety mechanism put in place by our brains. You know how the old stories go—when you come back from fairyland, it's either as a poet or mad. I'd think our brains would be scared about the madness part.”
“Left side, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Though that would mean that Wendy's already been there,” Sophie said.
“She probably has—in dreams she can't remember. Joe says everybody spends some time there when they're asleep and dreaming, but most of us just accept it as part of the dreams that our brains come up with to amuse our sleeping minds.”
“That's sounds like Joe.”
Jilly smiled. “Pretty much a verbatim quote.”
Sophie sighed. “But it doesn't answer why we find it hard to talk about our experience there as real. To just come out and say that the dreamlands themselves …” She found herself hesitating, still. “Are, you know. Real. Or why we can't find each other when we're there.”
“So why do you think that is?” Jilly asked. “And don't you dare say it's because we're having different dreams or I'll smack you. Once I can smack people again, that is.”
Sophie felt her heart go out to her friend. She couldn't begin to imagine how someone as active as Jilly was coping with all of this.
“I really don't know,” she said. She fiddled with the end of Jilly's sheet, then lifted her gaze to Jilly's face. “I'm supposed to be checking up on you there, you know.”
“Wendy?”
Sophie nodded. “Our resident poet is worried about you. She thinks you're just going away into the dreamlands forever.”
Jilly looked past her, out the window. Her gaze took on a faraway gleam.
“If I could, I would,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Not in dreams,” Jilly said, her gaze returning to Sophie. “But like Joe does. Crossing the border in my body—being there in flesh and blood. If I could step across for real, I don't know that I'd ever come back.”
“But … why? Are you so unhappy here? Or is it the magic thing?”
Jilly was forever talking about how she'd like to be magic. To live inside a story, instead of always standing on the outside of it. To know what magical beings did when they were just hanging out—and did they even hang out? What would it be
like
to be a part of that world?
“A bit of both,” Jilly said. “Well, no. That's not really true because
I'm not really unhappy, per se. Or at least I wasn't before the accident. These days, just a smile can be a real challenge sometimes.”
Sophie nodded, understanding.
“But I've always had this sense that there's something out there, waiting for me. Not here, in the World As It Is, but in the dreamlands. That there's a place for me in Faerie and I'll be there one day if I can just be good enough, or patient enough, or tenacious enough. Or …” She gave a small smile. “It's a place where I'd be home, really home. I want it so badly sometimes that just thinking about it hurts.”
Sophie regarded her for a long moment.
“I … I never knew,” she said finally. “You've never talked about anything like this before.”
“And say what?” Jilly asked. “How do you even begin to explain this sort of thing without sounding crazy?”
Sophie gave her a look.
“Okay,” Jilly said. “Even crazier than people already think I am.”
“I didn't think that mattered to you.”
“It doesn't. Not really. But this idea of a home waiting for me, somewhere in Faerie, it's so private and special that I couldn't bear to have anybody laughing about it.”
“I'm not laughing.”
“No,” Jilly said. “And you're not even pretending that it's something that can't be true, either.”
Sophie would have started to feel bad all over again, but she knew Jilly hadn't meant that as a recrimination.
“So,” Jilly went on. “I've been wanting to compare notes with you.”
Sophie could feel what was coming, and already her chest was starting to feel tight, her pulse quickening, but she was determined to fight the urge to close up. She was going to be completely open. Surprisingly, simply deciding that made the tension ease a little.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Well, do you have to actually think about crossing over when you're falling asleep, or do you just go there automatically?”
“I just close my eyes,” Sophie said, “and I'm there—usually in the same place I was the night before. You know, wherever I was when I last left. If I want to start off somewhere else, I have to be concentrating on it when I fall asleep. You?”
“Pretty much the same, though it took me a while to get the hang of it. At first I just kept showing up in any random place—well, mostly Mabon and the Greatwood. But I was wondering, can you go to sleep and not cross over?”
Sophie slowly shook her head. “It doesn't seem to be something I choose to do. The only choice I get is where I end up, and even that doesn't work all the time.”

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