Spiritwalk (2 page)

But the books also said that magic came awake in the night. It crept from its secret hidden places—called out by starlight and the moon—and lived until the dawn pinked the eastern skies. She always dreamed of the red-haired boy when she slept under his oak in the middle of the garden. But what if he was more than a dream? What if at night he stepped out of his tree—really and truly, flesh and blood and bone real?

There was only one way to find out.

Sara felt restless after Julie went home. She put away her guitar and then distractedly set about straightening up her room. But for every minute she spent on the task, she spent three just looking out the window at the garden.

I never dream, she thought.

Which couldn’t be true. Everything she’d read about sleep research and dreaming said that she had to dream. People just needed to. Dreams were supposed to be the way your subconscious cleared up the day’s clutter. So, ipso facto, everybody dreamed. She just didn’t remember hers.

But I did when I was a kid, she thought. Why did I stop? How could I have forgotten the red-haired boy in the tree?

Merlin.

Dusk fell outside her window to find her sitting on the floor, arms folded on the windowsill, chin resting on her arms as she looked out over the garden. As the twilight deepened, she finally stirred. She gave up the pretense of cleaning up her room. Putting on a jacket, she went downstairs and out into the garden.

Into the Mondream Wood.

Eschewing the paths that patterned the garden, she walked across the dew-wet grass, fingering the damp leaves of the bushes and the low-hanging branches of the trees. The dew made her remember Gregor Penev—an old Bulgarian artist who’d been staying in the House when she was a lot younger. He’d been full of odd little stories and explanations for natural occurrences—much like Jamie was, which was probably why Gregor and her uncle had gotten along so well.

“
Zaplakala e gorata
, “ he’d replied when she’d asked him where dew came from and what it was for. “The forest is crying. It remembers the old heroes who lived under its branches—the heroes and the magicians, all lost and gone now. Robin Hood. Indje Voivode. Myrddin.”

Myrddin. That was another name for Merlin. She remembered reading somewhere that Robin Hood was actually a Christianized Merlin, the Anglo version of his name being a variant of his Saxon name of Rof Breocht Woden—the Bright Strength of Wodan. But if you went back far enough, all the names and stories got tangled up in one story. The tales of the historical Robin Hood, like those of the historical Merlin of the Borders, had acquired older mythic elements common to the world as a whole by the time they were written down. The story that their legends were really telling was that of the seasonal hero-king, the May Bride’s consort, who with his cloak of leaves and his horns, and all his varying forms, was the secret truth that lay in the heart of every forest.

“But those are European heroes,” she remembered telling Gregor. “Why would the trees in our forest be crying for them?”

“All forests are one,” Gregor had told her, his features serious for a change. “They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”

She hadn’t really understood him then, but she was starting to understand him now as she made her way to the fountain at the center of the garden, where the old oak tree stood guarding its secrets in the heart of the Mondream Wood. There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.

The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth—through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees, remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

Which was why the druids’ Ogham was also a calendar of trees.

Why Merlin was often considered to be a druid.

Why Robin was the name taken by the leaders of witch covens.

Why the Green Man had antlers—because a stag’s tines are like the branches of a tree.

Why so many of the early avatars were hung from a tree. Osiris. Balder. Dionysus. Christ.

Sara stood in the heart of the Mondream Wood and looked up at the old oak tree. The moon lay behind its branches, mysteriously close. The air was filled with an electric charge, as though a storm were approaching, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

“Now I remember what happened that night,” Sara said softly.

Sara grew to be a small woman, but at nine years old she was just a tiny waif—no bigger than a minute, as Jamie liked to say. With her diminutive size she could slip soundlessly through thickets that would allow no easy egress for an adult. And that was how she went.

She was a curly-haired gamine, ghosting through the hawthorn hedge that bordered the main path. Whispering across the small glade guarded by the statue of a little horned man that Jamie said was Favonius, but she privately thought of as Peter Pan, though he bore no resemblance to the pictures in her Barrie book. Tiptoeing through the wildflower garden, a regular gallimaufry of flowering plants, both common and exotic. And then she was near the fountain. She could see Merlin’s oak, looming up above the rest of the garden like the lordly tree it was.

And she could hear voices.

She crept nearer, a small shadow hidden in deeper patches cast by the fat yellow moon.

“—never a matter of choice,” a man’s voice was saying. “The lines of our lives are laid out straight as a dodman’s leys, from event to event. You chose your road.”

She couldn’t see the speaker, but the timbre of his voice was deep and resonating, like a deep bell. She couldn’t recognize it, but she did recognize Merlin’s when he replied to the stranger.

“When I chose my road, there was no road. There was only the trackless wood; the hills, lying crest to crest like low-backed waves; the glens where the harps were first imagined and later strung.
Ca’canny
, she told me when I came into the Wood. I thought go gentle meant go easy, not go fey; that the oak guarded the Borders, marked its boundaries. I never guessed it was a door.”

“All knowledge is a door,” the stranger replied. “You knew that.”

“In theory,” Merlin replied.

“You meddled.”

“I was born to meddle. That was the part I had to play.”

“But when your part was done,” the stranger said, “you continued to meddle.”

“It’s in my nature, Father. Why else was I chosen?”

There was a long silence then. Sara had an itch on her nose but she didn’t dare move a hand to scratch it. She mulled over what she’d overheard, trying to understand.

It was all so confusing. From what they were saying it seemed that her Merlin
was
the Merlin in the stories. But if that was true, then why did he look like a boy her own age? How could he even still be alive? Living in a tree in Jamie’s garden and talking to his father...

“I’m tired,” Merlin said. “And this is an old argument, Father. The winters are too short. I barely step into a dream and then it’s spring again. I need a longer rest. I’ve earned a longer rest. The Summer Stars call to me.”

“Love bound you,” the stranger said.

“An oak bound me. I never knew she was a tree.”

“You knew. But you preferred to ignore what you knew because you had to riddle it all. The salmon wisdom of the hazel wasn’t enough. You had to partake of the fruit of every tree.”

“I’ve learned from my error,” Merlin said. “Now set me free, Father.”

“I can’t. Only love can unbind you.”

“I can’t be found, I can’t be seen,” Merlin said. “What they remember of me is so tangled up in Romance, that no one can find the man behind the tales. Who is there to love me?”

Sara pushed her way out of the thicket where she’d been hiding and stepped into the moonlight.

“There’s me,” she began, but then her voice died in her throat.

There was no red-haired boy standing by the tree. Instead, she found an old man with the red-haired boy’s eyes. And a stag. The stag turned its antlered head toward her and regarded her with a gaze that sent shivers scurrying up and down her spine. For a long moment its gaze held hers; then it turned, its flank flashing red in the moonlight, and the darkness swallowed it.

Sara shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, but she couldn’t escape the chill.

The stag...

That was impossible. The garden had always been strange, seeming so much larger than its acreage would allow, but there couldn’t possibly be a deer living in it without her having seen it before. Except... What about a boy becoming an old man overnight? A boy who really and truly did live in a tree?

“Sara,” the old man said.

It was Merlin’s voice. Merlin’s eyes. Her Merlin grown into an old man.

“You... you’re old,” she said.

“Older than you could imagine.”

“But—”

“I came to you as you’d be most likely to welcome me.”

“Oh.”

“Did you mean what you said?” he asked.

Memories flooded Sara. She remembered a hundred afternoons of warm companionship. All those hours of quiet conversation and games. The peace that came from her night fears. If she said yes, then he’d go away. She’d lose her friend. And the night fears... Who’d be there to make the terrors go away? Only he had been able to help her. Not Jamie nor anyone else who lived in the House, though they’d all tried.

“You’ll go away... won’t you?” she said.

He nodded. An old man’s nod. But the eyes were still young. Young and old, wise and silly, all at the same time. Her red-haired boy’s eyes.

“I’ll go away,” he replied. “And you won’t remember me.”

“I won’t forget,” Sara said. “I would never forget.”

“You won’t have a choice,” Merlin said. “Your memories of me would come with me when I go.”

“They’d be... gone forever... ?”

That was worse than losing a friend. That was like the friend never having been there in the first place.

“Forever,” Merlin said. “Unless...”

His voice trailed off, his gaze turned inward.

“Unless what?” Sara asked finally.

“I could try to send them back to you when I reach the other side of the river.”

Sara blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? The other side of what river?”

“The Region of the Summer Stars lies across the water that marks the boundary between what is and what has been. It’s a long journey to that place. Sometimes it takes many lifetimes.”

They were both quiet then. Sara studied the man that her friend had become. The gaze he returned her was mild. There were no demands in it. There was only regret. The sorrow of parting. A fondness that asked for nothing in return.

Sara stepped closer to him, hesitated a moment longer, then hugged him.

“I do love you, Merlin,” she said. “I can’t say I don’t when I do.”

She felt his arms around her, the dry touch of his lips on her brow.

“Go gentle,” he said. “But beware the calendaring of the trees.”

And then he was gone.

One moment they were embracing and the next her arms only held air. She let them fall limply to her sides. The weight of an awful sorrow bowed her head. Her throat grew thick, her chest tight. She swayed where she stood, tears streaming from her eyes.

The pain felt like it would never go away.

But the next thing she knew she was waking in her bed in the northwest tower and it was the following morning. She woke from a dreamless sleep, clear-eyed and smiling. She didn’t know it, but her memories of Merlin were gone.

But so were her night fears.

The older Sara, still not a woman, but old enough to understand more of the story now, fingered a damp leaf and looked up into the spreading canopy of the oak above her.

Could any of that really have happened? she wondered. The electric charge she’d felt in the air when she’d approached the old oak was gone. That pregnant sense of something about to happen had faded. She was left with the moon, hanging lower now, the stars still bright, the garden quiet. It was all magical, to be sure, but natural magic—not supernatural.

She sighed and kicked at the autumn debris that lay thick about the base of the old tree. Browned leaves, broad and brittle. And acorns. Hundreds of acorns. Fred the gardener would be collecting them soon for his compost—at least those that the black squirrels didn’t hoard away against the winter. She went down on one knee and picked up a handful of them, letting them spill out of her hand.

Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell, and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye. Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.

A hazelnut.

Salmon wisdom locked in a seed.

Had she regained memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream in the Mondream Wood where as a child she’d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?

Smiling, she pocketed the nut, then slowly made her way back into the House.

ASCIAN IN ROSE

ASCIAN
—one who casts no shadow

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence,
listening
To silence.

—Thomas Hood, from “Autumn”

One

She was running along a downhill stretch of the Gatineau Parkway, an asphalt ribbon that cut through the wooded Gatineau Hills. The grass on the verge swallowed the sound of her footsteps, but not the ragged rasp of her breathing. Panic shrieked through every nerve end. The moon was fat and swollen above her, but she cast no shadow.

Her mind was empty, except for her fear. She couldn’t remember her name. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know who was chasing her. All she knew was that they were closing in.

Terror drummed in her chest—a monster that consumed her with a will of its own. It wailed through her nervous system, a banshee howl that gained intensity with every pace that closed the gap between herself and what she fled.

And then she stumbled.

She fell with bruising force against the ground. Flailing her arms, she landed in a sprawl. One hand clawed at the grass, trying to stop the force of her momentum. The other was closed in a fist so tight that her knuckles were white.

Sobbing for breath, she began to haul herself to her feet, but then they were there, a circle of them standing all around her.

Not one of them appeared out of breath.

They were squat ugly creatures, body hair covering their lower torso and legs like wiry trousers, their upper bodies hairless and pale. Wide noses split their flat faces. The heads were triangular, reptilian almost. Thick dirty-white hair like a Rastaman’s dread-locks hung to their broad shoulders. Their eyes were a deep green and, in the moonlight, gleamed like the reflective retinas of a cat.

She turned slowly, panting for air, taking in their watching stance, the grins that split thick lips, the utter silence with which they encircled her. They cast shadows, thick and crouching on the grass. Something in their eyes, in the alien set of their features, told her that the chase, by and of itself, held a certain pleasure for them.

“P-please...” she tried, but knew before she spoke that whatever she said would mean nothing to them. “I don’t... I never... don’t...”

Had they been willing to listen, she wouldn’t have known what to say. Her mind was empty, filled only with emotion. Fear. Raw, paralyzing fear.

The circle opened then and another of the creatures walked slowly toward her. There were bones woven into his hair—small bones like those of a bird, or a rodent, or a man’s fingers. His phallus stood erect between his legs, its tip shiny. The lust in his eyes was not a carnal lust for her body, but a lust for the hunt. She was the game, those eyes told her, and she had quit the chase too soon.

“Run!” he told her, the word issuing like a grunt.

“P-please...” she tried again.

He carried a short staff, bedecked with bones and shells and feathers tied to it by leather thongs. He raised it and she cringed, waiting for the blow, but then there was a new sound in the night. A distant throbbing like thunder. He hesitated, staff still lifted. His nostrils flared as he turned his head toward the source of the sound.

Light blossomed at the top of the hill, the thunder resolving into the roar of an engine. When the machine topped the rise, it appeared to be bathed in a halo of light. The leader of the creatures grunted—they were words, but they were unintelligible to her. Like ghosts, for all their bulk, the creatures melted into the night.

The leader was last to go. He touched her knee with the tip of his staff and pain fired there, lancing up her thigh. Then he, too, was gone.

She collapsed forward, crouching on her hands and knees in the damp grass, rough sobs heaving up her throat. That was the position in which the headbeam of the chopped-down 1958 Harley-Davidson caught her. The big motor whined down as its rider brought the machine to a halt. He shut off the engine, but the headbeam stayed on, as he had it wired to the bike’s accessory terminal. With just a six-volt battery powering it, he had about fifteen minutes of light. Kicking out the stand, he rested the Harley’s weight on it.

“Hey.”

The voice was gentle, but she didn’t look up. The rider took off his black helmet and laid it on the seat of the Harley, then stepped cautiously toward her, approaching her as though she were a wild animal that would flee at the slightest provocation. His gaze darted left and right, looking for whatever had left her in this condition, but the night was quiet. The only sound was the creak of his boots as he knelt down by her, close, but not close enough to frighten her.

“Hey,” he said again. “How bad are you hurting?”

This time she looked up. She saw a broad-shouldered man, the eagle of a Harley T-shirt stretched tight against a weight lifter’s build. His jeans were greasy, his boots black. His face was roughly sculptured, as though an artist had roughed it out in clay but never gone back to finish it. Long black hair was drawn back in a ponytail. He cast a shadow that stretched out long in front of him, almost touching her.

“P-please...” she mumbled as though it were the only word she knew. Where was her name? Where was her past?

She knew enough to know that she should have one, but while she could remember a thousand details about the world, anything personal was simply a blank.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore,” the man said.

He reached a hand out to her and she cringed back. The tightly closed fist opened convulsively and a small round white disc fell on the grass between them. Moving slowly, he picked it up and held it up to the light thrown by the Harley’s headbeam.

“Shit,” he said, looking at that bone disc. His gaze returned to her. “Where did you get this?”

Fear filled her eyes. “I... I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you. What’s your name?”

Tears brimmed. “I don’t know.”

He studied her for a long moment. She was pretty in a way he couldn’t define—not any one thing on its own, but everything together. There was a tanned glow to her skin. Her hair was a chestnut red and tied back in a French braid. She wore jeans and a white blouse with a frill around the neckline. Adidas on her feet. No purse. The big green-gray eyes, wet with tears, regarded him, still afraid.

“I know I don’t look like much,” he said, “but I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that I won’t hurt you. Tell me where you want to go and I’ll take you there, okay?”

“I don’t... I don’t have anyplace....” The words were barely a whisper.

“You’re scared, right?”

Numbly, she nodded.

“Do you want to try to trust me?”

A weak shrug.

“You can’t stay here on your own.”

“But I... I...”

This time he moved forward, and as the flood of tears broke, he held her against his shoulder. At first she went stiff and pushed weakly at him, but he was too strong. Then she went limp in his arms.

“Everything’s going to work out,” he said. “It usually does—though it doesn’t seem like it at the time.” He spoke soothingly, as though to a wounded animal. “My name’s Blue—funny name for a guy, right? But you should hear what my old lady saddled me with....”

2

In the bedroom of her small chalet in Old Chelsea, Emma Fenn woke suddenly to lie staring up at the pooling shadows of her bedroom ceiling. The three-room building creaked to itself. Outside, choruses of crickets and frogs vied with each other. In the combination living room/kitchen, the metal hands of the old mantel clock above the fireplace were edging toward midnight.

Emma had owned the chalet for a short enough time to still wake each morning with a warm sense of ownership. She had a mortgage, true enough, but the building and its acre and a half of land were still hers. The sense of proprietorship made up for the half-hour drive to and from the city where she worked five days a week.

But it was almost midnight now, not morning, and what filled her as she lay staring up at her ceiling was only an emptiness and nothing more. She sat up, tugging a pillow up behind her. Half-asleep, she became more and more awake as she explored her feelings—or rather her lack of them.

While she never considered herself emotionally unstable, she was still aware of her easy susceptibility to sudden mood swings. She was either bubbling with happiness, or vivid with anger, or mind-numbingly bored, or hopelessly sadbut never this. Never just... empty. It wasn’t the bleakness of a depression, either. There was simply nothing there.

Why am I doing this to myself? she wondered. Of course I’ve still got feelings. It’s not like someone came along while I was sleeping and just stole them all away....

Some vague memory stirred at that ridiculous thought. She had the oddest feeling that something strange
had
happened to her this evening, but she couldn’t pinpoint it for the life of her. Getting up from the bed, she padded barefoot out through the living room to the bathroom. There she flicked on the light and blinked at its glare. Once her eyes had adjusted to it, she leaned forward to look at herself in the mirror.

Her familiar features leaned toward her in the mirror. Nothing different there.

She sat down on the toilet, jumping with a start when something touched her bare calves. It was only her cat, Beng. Lean and black, Beng was a gangly eight-month-old stray that had appeared one morning on her doorstep not long after she moved in, and never left. According to a book she was reading at the time, “Beng” was a Romany word for the devil, and since the cat looked as though he had more than a bit of the devil in him, she decided that the name fit him to a T.

“Do you think it’s time for breakfast?” she asked as she hoisted him onto her lap.

Beng purred noisily, pushing his head agaisnt her arm while kneading her lap. Emma got no pleasure from the cat’s familiar ministrations. After a few moments, she put him down on the floor again and drifted into the living room. Past twelve. She opened her front door and stared through the screen at the night.

What’s wrong with me? she thought. Why do I feel as though someone’s snuck in and stole away a part of me?

She called up some memories. Office politics—Gina playing her against their superivisor—but while she could perceive that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do, she couldn’t muster any anger at Gina tonight. All right. Jimmy dropping her for that anorexic model bimbo of his. That hurt was only three weeks old. But while she could remember the pain of the moment, and her subsequent anger, right now she didn’t feel anything.

This was starting to get scary, she thought, except those emotions, too, were more something she realized she
should
be feeling than what she actually
was
.

Beng wrapped himself around her legs until she bent down and cradled him in her arms. Closing the door, she retraced her way to the bathroom, shut off the light, and went back to bed. She lay there in the dark, sensing the house around her, the night beyond its walls, Beng curled up and purring on her stomach, but still couldn’t call up one genuine feeling that wasn’t a secondhand memory.

The cat, had he been able to speak, might have mentioned one more oddity to her. When she was in the bathroom with the light on, she had cast no shadow. But whatever languages Beng knew, there weren’t any that he shared with his mistress.

3

Blue held her until the flood of tears subsided into sniffles. The headbeam on his Harley had gotten a little dimmer. To save his battery, he left her for a moment to shut it off, then came back and sat near her, keeping his distance now so that she wouldn’t feel threatened.

“The way I see it,” he said, “is we’ve got two choices. Either we camp out here for the night, or I take you somewhere.”

The moonlight was bright enough for him to see her stiffen, even if he couldn’t make out her features.

“I... I told you...” she began haltingly.

“Okay,” he said quickly. “No problem—or at least nothing we can’t handle. I know a place in town where you can stay long as you want. Are you game?”

She nodded slowly.

“We’re going to have to find a name for you. I can’t just go around calling you ’hey you.’ “

“I’d like one like yours—a color.”

“Sure. Black and Blue—wouldn’t we make a pair?”

“But I can’t think of a name. I...”

“Don’t force it,” Blue said. He looked down at the button-sized bone disc in his hand. “Maybe I’ll just call you Button.” His smile was lost in the dark.

“B-button?”

She was like a mouse, Blue thought, all trembling and scared and lost in the middle of a field. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? We can think up a better one later. But first we’ll find ourselves a more comfortable place to hang out in—what do you say?”

“Okay.”

“So let’s go.”

He fitted her with his spare helmet, then pushed his own down over his thick hair. Warning her to hang on, he kicked the bike into life and headed down the parkway, the big engine throbbing under them.

She held on, leaning close against him. He could feel her breasts through the thin material of his T-shirt, her arms tight around his waist. Her closeness woke memories he didn’t want to deal with, but he couldn’t help realizing how much he’d missed having someone to care about. Somone to cruise with and hang around with in the House. Someone who could maybe care for him....